Hacker News Reader

Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

Basically it seems you are lacking only two shell commands.

    virtualenv venv
    . venv/bin/activate

Then everything works with pip

    pip install numpy

I actually prefer the pipenv way (or the virtualenvwrapper way) of putting virtualenvs into a dedicated location, so that I can wipe them off the hard disk if I want to free some space.

The real interesting and occasionally bothering point on managing your virtualenv is resolution of dependencies and compatibility ranges (hard to solve in general).

View on HN

At a previous job, we used an even simpler solution: just download everything to a directory (called "deps") with

    pip install --target deps -r requirements.txt

Then running the application with

    PYTHONPATH=deps python myapp.py

This was also simple to integrate with service supervisors, since most make it easy to configure a environment variable.

Making a note of this, didn't know about the target flag, thanks !

Virtualenv tip: you can skip the Bash magic of calling "activate" by providing the path to the python executable.

    /hello/venvs/myproject/bin/python myscript.py

will run myscript.py exactly as if the virtualenv was active, which is easier to configure for cron jobs and services.

If this works for you, good. I think I would be cautious giving this out as advice because you can run into problems this way with regards to different python versions. The activate script uses the python version used to setup the environment.

This doesn’t address his problem of dependencies being “halfway across my computer.”

Yes it does. Everything is installed in the venv folder. To start fresh you just delete it [and restart bash].

That's true, but I assumed GP was referring to the fact that venvs are kept in a global, e.g. $HOME/.venvs, rather than in $(pwd)/.venv like $(pwd)/node_modules.

If you're using the commands in that post, the venv won't be kept in a global location.

Those shell commands don't do anything to publish a package, do they? Sorry, python is still lacking quite a bit of what e.g. js with npm has had for years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com