We all must have faced the situation where version of our packages don’t match and takes up hours of our time to get solved. A virtual Environment is an isolates working environment of a Python project so that other projects aren’t hampered.
So, lets start the configuration with virtualenv. To install it via pip
$ pip install virtualenv
See, it is as simple as that. Now, you can work in an isolated python3.6 project and also in an isolated python3.7 project without affecting each other. Let’s explore it’s usages and how it is done:
- To make a virtualenv:
$ virtualenv testEnv
- To initiate the virtualenv
$ source testEnv/bin/activate
Note: to run this 3. To deactivate the environment
$ deactivate
But wait, there’s more to it. There’s another amazing additive layer of virtualenvwrapper that makes you task much easier and convenient. To install it:
$ pip install virtualenvwrapper
and then and add following lines to your .bashrc file that must be in your /home
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3
export WORKON_HOME=~/Envs
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
Note: ‘Envs’ is the name of directory and you can choose any name for you.
And finally, to reload the bashrc and to apply the changes instantly run in your terminal
source ~/.bashrc
Now you can simply run
$ mkvirtualenv testEnv
to create a virtualenv. Aditionally, you can specify the python version yourself by
$ mkvirtualenv --python=python2 testEnv2
virtualenvwrapper enables you to activate the environment by by a simple keyword ‘workon’ followed by the environment name.
workon testEnv