A few words about Virtualenv in Python. It's a simple approach to isolate your python development environment from other development environments, and, equally importantly, from your global Python packages. If you're using any Unix based system (this includes any Linux and MacOS system) you have Python installed and most in cases you will have other packages installed with it as well. Virtualenv will prevent packages being imported if you haven't installed them for your project, it will keep your different versions of the same package separate, and allows you to freeze the project state and send this to your team member who can then recreate the environment seamlessly.
Virtualenv comes with nice extension called virtualenvwrapper which will give you a lot of useful commands. So let's get it working.
$ sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper # or $ sudo easy_install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
and then append this line to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc.
[[ -e /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh ]] && source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
You are ready to go, your virtualenv is set up and ready. You can read more about the details http://virtualenv.readthedocs.org and http://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org
upsearch() { test / == "$PWD" && return || \ test -f "$1" && echo "$PWD/$1" && return || \ cd .. && upsearch "$1" } has_virtualenv() { VIRTUALENV_FILE=`upsearch .virtualenv` if [ $VIRTUALENV_FILE ] then VIRTUALENV_NAME=$(cat $VIRTUALENV_FILE) if [ -d "$WORKON_HOME/$VIRTUALENV_NAME" ]; then if [ -z $VIRTUAL_ENV ] || [ $VIRTUAL_ENV -a $(basename "$VIRTUAL_ENV") != $VIRTUALENV_NAME ]; then workon $VIRTUALENV_NAME fi else VIRTUALENV_REQUIREMENTS="$PWD/requirements.txt" if [ -f $VIRTUALENV_REQUIREMENTS ]; then mkvirtualenv $VIRTUALENV_NAME -r $VIRTUALENV_REQUIREMENTS else mkvirtualenv $VIRTUALENV_NAME fi site_packages="`virtualenvwrapper_get_site_packages_dir`" ln -s `virtualenvwrapper_get_site_packages_dir` "$PWD/.site-packages" fi else if [ $VIRTUAL_ENV ]; then deactivate fi fi } function venv_cd () { builtin cd $@ && has_virtualenv } alias cd="venv_cd"
This is a part of my ~/.zshrc, but it should work with ~/.bashrc as well. Also plese note that /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh in your case maybe located somewhere else.
If Bash is all Greek to you, here's your plain English guide to the code above. The very last line is responsible for overwriting the cd command in your shell. Every single time you try to change your current directory the function has_virtualenv will be executed. The function will try to do upsearch for the .virtualenv file. Let's say that you right now:
/home/user/mystuff/projects/AllTheThings/
The upsearch function will try to locate the .virtualenv file and read its content, which is a single, simple line saying which virtualenv to launch. The current location and all parent locations will be searched.
/home/user/mystuff/projects/AllTheThings/.virtualenv /home/user/mystuff/projects/.virtualenv /home/user/mystuff/.virtualenv /home/user/.virtualenv /home/.virtualenv /.virtualenv
If the file is located, virtualenv will be launched. But why read all parent locations? Well, maybe all parent locations is a bit too much, but nevertheless I'm reading parent locations, because sometimes projects are decoupled into smaller units. Your virtualenv can be overwritten on different levels, and sometimes it happens that when using cd you will jump to a directory deeper than the main one, and you will miss the .virtualenv file.
The next things that will happen are: if a virtualenv environment with a name matching the content of the first found .virtualenv already exists, it will simply switch to this one. If not, a new one will be created and, if you have defined requirements.txt file , this file will be picked up as well and all requirements stored there will be installed to the new virtualenv. If the new virtualenv has been created, the symlink to site-packages will be created as well.
The last thing worth mentioning is that when you leave the range of upsearch, virtualenv will be deactivated, which means that you're not going to drag it to different projects or locations in your system.