I use virtualenv begrudgingly. I know it’s what you should do, but setting up and maintaining virtualenvs manually gets old quickly. For the past few months, I’ve been using autoenv to automate this process, and now I use virtual environments much more consistently.

Why You Should Care

Python’s import system takes a bit of time to get used to. For the first ~year of my Python journey, just seeing the $PYTHONPATH environment variable threw up so many “Here Be Dragons” red flags that I’d break down and nuke my Python setup to avoid dealing with it.

PYTHONPATH, really, is just the same as the normal PATH: it specifies to python where it should look for packages when you call import. However, for most projects you’ll want to maintain a requirements.txt to allow your users to install the pip requirements for your project.

However, if your PYTHONPATH is cluttered with packages that are irrelevant to the project you’re working on, getting a consistently correct, lean requirements.txt is impossible.

This is why you really should use virtual environments for all python projects. Virtual environments allow you to create a separate set of python packages away from your system-level packages, thus keeping your PYTHONPATH clean and your pip freeze > requirements.txt runs accurate.

This keeps your system-level packages in-tact, your project dependencies clear, and you’ll probably never have to go down the rabbit hole of fixing a broken $PYTHONPATH. If worse comes to worst, just nuke your virtual environment and reinstall painlessly from your requirements.txt.

Setting up Autoenv

Installing Autoenv is pretty trivial. It’s as simple as:

pip install autoenv
echo "source `which activate.sh`" >> ~/.bashrc

Autoenv acts like a .bashrc for every folder on your machine. Just put a .env file in your project with some commands to execute, and every time you cd into that directory you’ll automatically get everything setup.

Your .env file should do two things:

  1. Clear your PYTHONPATH variable to prevent confusion with system-level installed packages.
  2. Activate your virtualenv.

Here’s my ideal .env file:

export PYTHONPATH=.
source /path/to/project/directory/venv/bin/activate

Short. Simple. Extensible. Just add additional exports as necessary if you want to set other environment variables.

In fact, you can get this all setup with two commands:

virtualenv venv
echo "export PYTHONPATH=.\nsource `pwd`/venv/bin/activate" > .env

Then, just cd into your project directory, and you’ll have your virtual environment setup and ready for package installations.

Bonus Points

Autoenv executes .env files in each of the parent directories of your current directory. So, if I cd to ~/Documents/MyProject, Autoenv looks for:

  • ~/.env
  • ~/Documents/.env
  • ~/Documents/Myproject/.env

… and executes them in that order.

This means, you can put a script in ~/.env and it’ll be executed prior to the project-specific .env.

You can take advantage of this to automatically deactivate virtual environments.

Simply make a .env in your home directory with this little script:

if which deactivate >/dev/null; then
    deactivate
fi

This will deactivate a virtual environment if you have one activated. So, if you cd outside your project, the virtual environment of that project is automatically deactivated. Awesome!