Python Virtual Environments
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Dependency management is hard. Luckily with Python there is a program called virtualenv
that can help isolate different projects and manage dependencies.
Commands
To create a new python 3.7 environment type in the following:
virtualenv --python=python3.7 environment_name
Of course you can replace the python version with whichever version you like. Now to go into the environment do the following:
source environment_name/bin/activate
This now sets up your python interpreter and other utilities to use the installation in the environment_name
folder. You can now install python packages using pip
and have it only reside in this environment.
To save all currently installed packages into requirements.txt
:
pip freeze > requirements.txt
You can then install those packages in a different virtualenv session with:
pip install -r requirements.txt
You can leave the virtualenv session with:
deactivate