Fix Python – Where should virtualenvs be created?

Question 1

I’m confused as to where I should put my virtualenvs.

With my first django project, I created the project with the command

django-admin.py startproject djangoproject

I then cd’d into the djangoproject directory and ran the command

virtualenv env

which created the virtual environment directory at the same level as the inner djangoproject directory.

Is this the wrong place in which to create the virtualenv for this particular project?

I’m getting the impression that most people keep all their virtualenvs together in an entirely different directory, e.g. ~/virtualenvs, and then use virtualenvwrapper to switch back and forth between them.

Is there a correct way to do this?

Question 2

Many people use the virtualenvwrapper tool, which keeps all virtualenvs in the same place (the ~/.virtualenvs directory) and allows shortcuts for creating and keeping them there. For example, you might do:

mkvirtualenv djangoproject

and then later:

workon djangoproject

It’s probably a bad idea to keep the virtualenv directory in the project itself, since you don’t want to distribute it (it might be specific to your computer or operating system). Instead, keep a requirements.txt file using pip:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

and distribute that. This will allow others using your project to reinstall all the same requirements into their virtualenv with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

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