Installation using setuptools and pip

Installation using setuptools and pip

NOTE: If you don't want to touch system files or you don't have root, please see this question on stackoverflow. For everyone else please read on...

Install setuptools and pip

According to the distribute website

setuptools

and

easy_install

are old and busted (the version included in Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't work with python3), and

distribute

and

pip

are the new hotness. So we will use those:
EDIT: Since September 2014,

distribute

has been merged back into

setuptools

. So we can use

setuptools

and

easy_install

again to install

pip

. Use:

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python

or

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python3

if you're using python 3, then install

pip

with

sudo easy_install pip

Optional: Turn on bash autocomplete for pip
Run

pip completion --bash >> ~/.bashrc

and run

source ~/.bashrc

to enable

Use pip to install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper

The reason we are also installing virtualenvwrapper is because it offers nice and simple commands to manage your virtual environments.

sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

Setup virtualenv

First we export the

WORKON_HOME

variable which contains the directory in which our virtual environments are to be stored. Let's make this

~/.virtualenvs

export WORKON_HOME=~/.virtualenvs

now also create this directory

mkdir $WORKON_HOME

and put this export in our

~/.bashrc

file so this variable gets automatically defined

echo "export WORKON_HOME=$WORKON_HOME" >> ~/.bashrc

Setup virtualenvwrapper

To use

virtualenvwrapper

we need to import its functions in our

~/.bashrc

echo "source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh" >> ~/.bashrc

We can also add some extra tricks like the following, which makes sure that if

pip

creates an extra virtual environment, it is also placed in our

WORKON_HOME

directory:

echo "export PIP_VIRTUALENV_BASE=$WORKON_HOME" >> ~/.bashrc

Source ~/.bashrc to load the changes

source ~/.bashrc

Test if it works
Now we create our first virtual environment

mkvirtualenv test

You will see that the environment will be set up, and your prompt now includes the name of your active environment in parentheses. Also if you now run

python -c "import sys; print sys.path"

you should see a lot of

/home/user/.virtualenv/...

because it now doesn't use your system site-packages.
You can deactivate your environment by running

deactivate

and if you want to work on it again, simply type

workon test

Finally, if you want to delete your environment, type

rmvirtualenv test

Enjoy!

Important note:

All virtual environments have pip automatically installed, never call

pip

with sudo in your virtual environment, because this will use the system wide

pip

.

Thanks to the author of this blogpost.