Manage multiple environments in one place.

Why use virtualenvwrapper?

Easy organization of multiple virtual environments and simple streamlined commands.

Key Features

• Places all of your virtual environments in a single directory.
• Wrappers for creating/copying/removing environments.
• Single command to switch between environments.
• Tab completion.
• User-defined operation hooks.
• Plugin system for generating extensions.

Installation Process

Basic virtualenv

Installing the base virtual env is outlined below.

$ pip install virtualenv
$ virtualenv ENV
$ source bin/activate

Virtualenvwrapper

To install virtualenvwrapper, we follow a similar pattern.

Install the package

Use pip to install the package.

$ pip install virtualenvwrapper

Create a home directory for all your virtual environments.

Now that we’ve installed virtualenvwrapper, let’s start using it. We’ll first set an environmental variable WORKON_HOME, and point it to our target folder /Envs rather than the default ~/.virtualenvs location.

We will do the same for projects with PROJECT_HOME.

Add the following to your Shell start up file.

$ export WORKON_HOME=~/Envs
$ export PROJECT_HOME=$WORKON_HOME/Projects
$ mkdir -p $WORKON_HOME
$ source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

NOTE TO WINDOWS USERS:
Use the following to add the lines to the bashrc file, you shouldn’t edit it with any windows apps, it can cause issues and result in a necessary re-installation of Ubuntu.
echo 'export WORKON_HOME=~/Envs'>> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export PROJECT_HOME=$WORKON_HOME/Projects' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'mkdir -p $WORKON_HOME' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

Additionally you may need to use the following command as well if you’re using Python3:
echo 'export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3' >> ~/virtualenvwrapper.sh

Create new environments/projects

We can make a new environment by using mkvirtualenv followed by your desired environment name.

$ mkvirtualenv env_1
$ mkvirtualenv env_2
$ mkvirtualenv env_3

Useful Option:
Use -r to specify a file containing a list of packages you’d like installed upon construction of the environment.
Example: $ mkvirtualenv env_4 -r file_with_listed_packages.txt

View Available Environments

We can view environments using ls with our environmental variable, or lsvirtualenv.

$ ls $WORKON_HOME

# Or simply
lsvirtualenv

Swap projects/environments

Moving between environments is pleasantly simple, we can call workon with a desired environment name.

(env_1)$ workon env_2

Remove an environment

We can remove environments with rmvirtualenv with the target name, but if it’s an active directory we have to deactivate our instance first, which we’ll do next.

rmvirtualenv env_1

Deactivate

When you’re finished working in an active virtual environment, you can end the session with deactivate, reflected by the removal of the parenthesized (env_1) affixed to the left of the money symbol.

If you wanted to remove env_1 while you’re already engaged with it, you’d first deactivate with deactivate.

(env_1)$ deactivate

Virtualenv Directory Shortcut

To quickly hop to your virtual environment home directory, you can call cdvirtualenv.

(env_1)$ cdvirtualenv