Fix Python – How to rename a virtualenv in Python?

Question 1

I misspelled the name of the virtualenv while initializing it using:

$ virtualenv vnev

I actually intended to create the environment with the name venv.
Having tried to rename the vnev folder to venv, I find that this doesn’t provide much help. The name of the activate environment still renames the old vnev.

$ mv vnev venv
$ . venv/bin/activate
(vnev) $ deactivate

I would like to know how to go about renaming the environment?

Question 2

By default virtualenv does not support the renaming of environments. It is safer to just delete the virtualenv directory and create a new one with the correct name. You can do this by:

Activate your virtualenv: source vnev/bin/activate
Create a requirements.txt of currently installed packages: pip freeze > requirements.txt
Delete the misspelled virtualenv: rm -r vnev/
Create a new virtualenv with correct name: virtualenv venv
Activate new virtualenv: source venv/bin/activate
Install packages from requirements.txt: pip install -r requirements.txt

If recreating is not an option there are 3rd party tools like virtualenv-mv that might be helpful.

Alternatively you can use virtualenvwrapper which provides the cpvirtualenv command to copy or rename virtualenvs.

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