If you’re not familiar with Python virtual environments, we recommend reading the virtualenv section of the Python documentation for an overview.
This page was made to provide a cheat sheet for the most commonly used commands and actions that you can take when using a python virtual environment.
To create a new virtual environment, go to the directory where you would like it to be placed and run the command below:
virtualenv venv
Where venv is the name of the virtual environment you would like to create.
It is common practice to use venv as the name.
When you activate a virtual environment, virtualenv overwrites (temporarily)
some environment variables to place the venv/bin directory on your
$PATH and force the use of the Python interpreter and libraries installed
in the virtual environment.
To activate a virtual environment:
source venv/bin/activate
When activated, you will notice that the virtual environment name is now shown on the left side of the prompt. This is done to remind you that you are working “inside” this virtual environment.
Once you are done working in the virtual environment, you can deactivate it. This will revert the environment variables back to what they were, prior to it being activated.
To deactivate a virtual environment:
deactivate