User Guide

Introduction

Virtualenv has one basic command:

virtualenv

This will create a python virtual environment of the same version as virtualenv is installed into under path venv. The path where to generate the virtual environment can be changed via a positional argument being passed in, see the dest flag. The command line tool has quite a few of flags that modify the components behaviour, for a full list make sure to check out CLI flags.

The tool works in two phases:

  • Phase 1 discovers a python interpreter to create a virtual environment from (by default this is the same python as the one virtualenv is running from, however we can change this via the p option).

  • Phase 2 creates a virtual environment at the specified destination (dest), this can be broken down into three further sub-steps:

    • create a python that matches the target python interpreter from phase 1,

    • install (bootstrap) seed packages (one or more of pip, setuptools, wheel) in the created virtual environment,

    • install activation scripts into the binary directory of the virtual environment (these will allow end user to activate the virtual environment from various shells).

The python in your new virtualenv is effectively isolated from the python that was used to create it.

Python discovery

The first thing we need to be able to create a virtual environment is a python interpreter. This will describe to the tool what type of virtual environment you would like to create, think of it as: version, architecture, implementation.

virtualenv being a python application has always at least one such available, the one virtualenv itself is using it, and as such this is the default discovered element. This means that if you install virtualenv under python 3.8, virtualenv will by default create virtual environments that are also of version 3.8.

Created python virtual environments are usually not self-contained. A complete python packaging is usually made up of thousand of files, so it’s not efficient to install the entire python again into a new folder. Instead virtual environments are mere shells, that contain little within itself, and borrow most from the system python (this is what you installed, when you installed python itself). This does mean that if you upgrade your system python your virtual environments might break, so watch out. The upside of this referring to the system python is that creating virtual environments can be fast.

Here we’ll describe the builtin mechanism (note this can be extended though by plugins). The CLI flag p or python allows you to specify a python specifier for what type of virtual environment you would like, the format is either:

  • a relative/absolute path to a Python interpreter,

  • a specifier identifying the Python implementation, version, architecture in the following format:

    {python implementation name}{version}{architecture}
    

    We have the following restrictions:

    • the python implementation is all alphabetic characters (python means any implementation, and if is missing it defaults to python),

    • the version is a dot separated version number,

    • the architecture is either -64 or -32 (missing means any).

    For example:

    • python3.8.1 means any python implementation having the version 3.8.1,

    • 3 means any python implementation having the major version 3,

    • cpython3 means a CPython implementation havin the version 3,

    • pypy2 means a python interpreter with the PyPy implementation and major version 2.

    Given the specifier virtualenv will apply the following strategy to discover/find the system executable:

    • If we’re on Windows look into the Windows registry, and check if we see any registered Python implementations that match the specification. This is in line with expectation laid out inside PEP-514

    • Try to discover a matching python executable within the folders enumerated on the PATH environment variable. In this case we’ll try to find an executable that has a name roughly similar to the specification (for exact logic, please see the implementation code).

Warning

As detailed above virtual environments usually just borrow things from the system Python, they don’t actually contain all the data from the system Python. The version of the python executable is hardcoded within the python exe itself. Therefore if you upgrade your system Python, your virtual environment will still report the version before the upgrade, even though now other than the executable all additional content (standard library, binary libs, etc) are of the new version.

Baring any major incompatibilities (rarely the case) the virtual environment will continue working, but other than the content embedded within the python executable it will behave like the upgraded version. If a such virtual environment python is specified as the target python interpreter, we will create virtual environments that match the new system Python version, not the version reported by the virtual environment.

Creators

These are what actually setup the virtual environment, usually as a reference against the system python. virtualenv at the moment has two types of virtual environments:

  • venv - this delegates the creation process towards the venv module, as described in PEP 404. This is only available on Python interpreters having version 3.4 or later, and also has the downside that virtualenv must create a process to invoke that module (unless virtualenv is installed in the system python), which can be an expensive operation (especially true on Windows).

  • builtin - this means virtualenv is able to do the creation operation itself (by knowing exactly what files to create and what system files needs to be referenced). The creator with name builtin is an alias on the first creator that’s of this type (we provide creators for various target environments, that all differ in actual create operations, such as CPython 2 on Windows, PyPy2 on Windows, CPython3 on Posix, PyPy3 on Posix, and so on; for a full list see creator).

Seeders

These will install for you some seed packages (one or more of the: pip, setuptools, wheel) that enables you to install additional python packages into the created virtual environment (by invoking pip). There are two main seed mechanism available:

  • pip - this method uses the bundled pip with virtualenv to install the seed packages (note, a new child process needs to be created to do this).

  • app-data - this method uses the user application data directory to create install images. These images are needed to be created only once, and subsequent virtual environments can just link/copy those images into their pure python library path (the site-packages folder). This allows all but the first virtual environment creation to be blazing fast (a pip mechanism takes usually 98% of the virtualenv creation time, so by creating this install image that we can just link into the virtual environments install directory we can achieve speedups of shaving the initial 1 minutes 10 seconds down to just 8 seconds in case of copy, or 0.8 seconds in case symlinks are available - this is on Windows, Linux/macOS with symlinks this can be as low as 100ms from 3+ seconds).

Activators

These are activation scripts that will mangle with your shells settings to ensure that commands from within the python virtual environment take priority over your system paths. For example if invoking pip from your shell returned the system pythons pip before activation, once you do the activation this should refer to the virtual environments pip. Note, though that all we do is change priority; so if your virtual environments bin/Scripts folder does not contain some executable, this will still resolve to the same executable it would have resolved before the activation.

For a list of shells we provide activators see activators. The location of these is right alongside the python executables ( usually Scripts folder on Windows, bin on POSIX), and are named as activate (and some extension that’s specific per activator; no extension is bash). You can invoke them, usually by source-ing (the source command might vary by shell - e.g. bash is .):

source bin/activate

This is all it does; it’s purely a convenience of prepending the virtual environments binary folder onto the PATH environment variable. Note you don’t have to activate a virtual environment to use it. In this case though you would need to type out the path to the executables, rather than relying on your shell to resolve them to your virtual environment.

The activate script will also modify your shell prompt to indicate which environment is currently active. The script also provisions a decativate command that will allow you to undo the operation:

deactivate

Note

If using Powershell, the activate script is subject to the execution policies on the system. By default Windows 7 and later, the system’s execution policy is set to Restricted, meaning no scripts like the activate script are allowed to be executed.

However, that can’t stop us from changing that slightly to allow it to be executed. You may relax the system execution policy to allow running of local scripts without verifying the code signature using the following:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Since the activate.ps1 script is generated locally for each virtualenv, it is not considered a remote script and can then be executed.

A longer explanation of this can be found within Allison Kaptur’s 2013 blog post: There’s no magic: virtualenv edition explains how virtualenv uses bash and Python and PATH and PYTHONHOME to isolate virtual environments’ paths.