This is a list of user-contributed tips for making virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper even more useful. If you have tip to share, drop me an email or post a comment on this blog post and I’ll add it here.
From Nat:
Using zsh, I added some bits to $WORKON_HOME/post(de)activate to show the active virtualenv on the right side of my screen instead.
in postactivate:
PS1="$_OLD_VIRTUAL_PS1"
_OLD_RPROMPT="$RPROMPT"
RPROMPT="%{${fg_bold[white]}%}(env: %{${fg[green]}%}`basename \"$VIRTUAL_ENV\"`%{${fg_bold[white]}%})%{${reset_color}%} $RPROMPT"
and in postdeactivate:
RPROMPT="$_OLD_RPROMPT"
Adjust colors according to your own personal tastes or environment.
From Nat:
I also added the command ‘rehash’ to $WORKON_HOME/postactivate and $WORKON_HOME/postdeactivate as I was having some problems with zsh not picking up the new paths immediately.
Add this to your shell login script to make pip use the same directory for virtualenvs as virtualenvwrapper:
export PIP_VIRTUALENV_BASE=$WORKON_HOME
and Via Nat:
in addition to what becomingguru said, this line is key:
export PIP_RESPECT_VIRTUALENV=true
That makes pip detect an active virtualenv and install to it, without having to pass it the -E parameter.
Via James:
In the postmkvirtualenv script I have the following to create a directory based on the project name, add that directory to the python path and then cd into it:
proj_name=$(echo $VIRTUAL_ENV|awk -F'/' '{print $NF}')
mkdir $HOME/projects/$proj_name
add2virtualenv $HOME/projects/$proj_name
cd $HOME/projects/$proj_name
In the postactivate script I have it set to automatically change to the project directory when I use the workon command:
proj_name=$(echo $VIRTUAL_ENV|awk -F'/' '{print $NF}')
cd ~/projects/$proj_name
Justin Lily posted about some code he added to his shell environment to look at the directory each time he runs cd. If it finds a .venv file, it activates the environment named within. On leaving that directory, the current virtualenv is automatically deactivated.
Harry Marr wrote a similar function that works with git repositories.
Via rizumu:
I have this postmkvirtualenv to install the get a basic setup.
$ cat postmkvirtualenv
#!/usr/bin/env bash
curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.p... />python distribute_setup.py
rm distribute_setup.py
easy_install pip==dev
pip install Mercurial
Then I have a pip requirement file with my dev tools.
$ cat developer_requirements.txt
ipdb
ipython
pastescript
nose
http://douglatornell.ca/software/python/Nosy-1.0.tar.gz
coverage
sphinx
grin
pyflakes
pep8
Then each project has it’s own pip requirement file for things like PIL, psycopg2, django-apps, numpy, etc.
Via mae:
This is supposed to be executed after workon, that is as a postactivate hook. It basically overrides cd to know about the VENV so instead of doing cd to go to ~ you will go to the venv root, IMO very handy and I can’t live without it anymore. if you pass it a proper path then it will do the right thing.
cd () {
if (( $# == 0 ))
then
builtin cd $VIRTUAL_ENV
else
builtin cd "$@"
fi
}
cd