Fix Python – Renaming a virtualenv folder without breaking it

Question 1

I’ve created folder and initialized a virtualenv instance in it.

$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ virtualenv env

When I run (env)$ pip freeze, it shows the installed packages as it should.

Now I want to rename myproject/ to project/.

$ mv myproject/ project/

However, now when I run

$ . env/bin/activate
(env)$ pip freeze

it says pip is not installed. How do I rename the project folder without breaking the environment?

Question 2

You need to adjust your install to use relative paths. virtualenv provides for this with the --relocatable option. From the docs:

Normally environments are tied to a
specific path. That means that you
cannot move an environment around or
copy it to another computer. You can
fix up an environment to make it
relocatable with the command:

$ virtualenv –relocatable ENV

NOTE: ENV is the name of the virtual environment and you must run this from outside the ENV directory.

This will make some of the files
created by setuptools or distribute
use relative paths, and will change
all the scripts to use
activate_this.py instead of using the
location of the Python interpreter to
select the environment.

Note: you must run this after you’ve
installed any packages into the
environment. If you make an
environment relocatable, then install
a new package, you must run virtualenv
–relocatable again.

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