Comments on: Workingenv is dead, long live Virtualenv!

By: Johan Segolsson

Johan Segolsson — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 13:48:28 +0000

Should virtualenv override the PYTHONPATH environment variable as well in the activate script?

By: Sean DiZazzo

Sean DiZazzo — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:43:39 +0000

Please remove the ‘not’ on line 400 of virtualenv.py Maybe I’m too tired, but it sure seems assbackwards.

By: kiorky

kiorky — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 18:18:32 +0000

I encountered problems while testing virtualenv under cygwin for an application port to windows. Here, you ll find a patch to make it working (it seems to). http://distfiles.minitage.org/public/externals/minitage/patches/virtualenv.win.diff

To be honnest, i’m not a windows user and do no want to.

By: Lee McFadden

Lee McFadden — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:21:10 +0000

I’m still having problems with certain packages on OS X 10.5, particularly Paste, but there may be others out there. I am trying to get TG2 into it’s own virtualenv so I don’t nuke my current development projects. Included is the result of easy_installing Paste (with the output from the end of an SQLAlchemy install to show what the paths should be):

Adding SQLAlchemy 0.4.1 to easy-install.pth file

Installed /Users/splee/envs/tg2/lib/python2.5/site-packages/SQLAlchemy-0.4.1-py2.5.egg
Finished processing dependencies for TurboGears2==2.0a1dev-r3757

(tg2)TheBeastie:src splee$ easy_install -U paste
Searching for paste
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/paste/
Couldn't retrieve index page for 'paste'
Scanning index of all packages (this may take a while)
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/Paste/
Reading http://pythonpaste.org
Best match: Paste 1.5.1
Processing Paste-1.5.1-py2.5.egg
Adding Paste 1.5.1 to easy-install.pth file

Using /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/Paste-1.5.1-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for paste
Finished processing dependencies for paste
(tg2)TheBeastie:src splee$

It seems that Paste is still being used from the global site-packages dir, even if I create the environment with the --no-site-packages option.

By: Simon King

Simon King — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:53:01 +0000

I think the Windows deactivate.bat script still has a couple of bugs. It contains this snippet:

if defined _OLD_VIRTUAL_WORKING_PATH (
    set PATH=%_OLD_VIRUTAL_PATH%
)
set _OLD_VIRTUAL_PATH=

That’s three different spellings of _OLD_VIRTUAL_PATH:

_OLD_VIRTUAL_WORKING_PATH
_OLD_VIRUTAL_PATH
_OLD_VIRTUAL_PATH

If I replace them all with _OLD_VIRTUAL_PATH, everything seems to work properly.

By: Graham Dumpleton

Graham Dumpleton — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:36:53 +0000

The other issue with Python 2.3 which had forgotten and only remembered when I tried to run in on a different MacOS X system, is that Python 2.3 doesn’t have the ’subprocess’ module. Thus it is necessary to copy this from a new version of Python and install it by hand before running virtualenv.

By: Jens Engel

Jens Engel — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:13:43 +0000

I have a problem creating a virtual environment with virtualenv-0.9.2 on Cygwin. The problem occurs when the Python interpreter/executable should be copied.

...
 File "virtualenv.py", line 468, in create_environment
    shutil.copyfile(sys.executable, py_executable)
...
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/bin/python'

The problem seems to be that Cygwin mostly hides the “.exe” file extension (or it is not considered for sys.executable in the Python port). But the file extension is needed for shutil.copyfile() to work.

QUICKFIX:

# -- INSERT-BEFORE: shutil.copyfile(sys.executable, py_executable), line 468
if sys.platform == "cygwin" and not sys.executable.endswith(".exe"):
    sys.executable += ".exe"

By: Sean Upton

Sean Upton — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:11:46 +0000

On Win32, packages that distutils need to build C modules for as part of easy_install within virtualenv require (at least for me), the workaround of copying c:\Python25\libs and c:\Python25\include - since there is not an include symlink like there is on virtualenv on unix. This was true with both MinGW and VC++ 2003 environments; this may be something to note in documentation. To duplicate within the virtual environment ‘easy_install zope.interface’ - this will attempt to build one C module in zope.interface after fetching the package, which fails prior to the workaround, but succeeds fine after copying the libs and include directory.

By: Graham Dumpleton

Graham Dumpleton — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:12:12 +0000

BTW, any chance you can document –no-site-packages option on PyPi site where documentation is for virtualenv. I see this as an important option when using mod_wsgi for shared hosting as in that sort of situation you want to base the underlying Python environment used by mod_wsgi off a virtual environment which has an empty site-packages. Specific applications would then add on top using their respective virtual environments using site.addsitedir() based mechanisms. If however the application owners didn’t use –no-site-packages option and a required module was in global site-packages, and thus easy_install didn’t add a copy to their own virtual environment, that module can then show up as missing when their application is run since mod_wsgi will not be using the globally installed Python environment.

By: Graham Dumpleton

Graham Dumpleton — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 09:32:53 +0000

Version 0.9.2 still doesn’t work on MacOS X 10.4 with OS supplied Python 2.3.

$ easy_install "TurboGears==1.0.4b2"
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/wsgi/virtualenv/ENV1/bin/easy_install", line 5, in ?
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
ImportError: No module named pkg_resources

This time it appears to be because ’set’ was used in site.py when Python 2.3 doesn’t support ’set’. Using ‘python -v’ with easy_install yields:

'import site' failed; traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/wsgi/virtualenv/ENV1/bin/../lib/python2.3/site.py", line 432, in ?
    main()
  File "/usr/local/wsgi/virtualenv/ENV1/bin/../lib/python2.3/site.py", line 412, in main
    paths_in_sys = removeduppaths()
  File "/usr/local/wsgi/virtualenv/ENV1/bin/../lib/python2.3/site.py", line 87, in removeduppaths
    known_paths = set()
NameError: global name 'set' is not defined