using-virtualenvs.md

Using Virtual Environments

It's strongly recommended that you set up your project in a virtual environment.

Follow one of the sections below depending on how you want to manage your virtualenvs.

Using your IDE

Many IDEs will manage your environments for you. This is a great and simple option that you won't have to fiddle with. Check your specific IDE's docs for guidance on how to do this.

• Virtual environments in VS Code
• Virtual environments in PyCharm

Be sure to choose Python 3.11 when setting up your virtual environment. If you don't see 3.11 as an option, you may need to install it first.

Manually managing environments

Follow these steps if you want to manage your virtual environments outside your IDE. Using venv is recommended if you're not sure which option to use.

Using venv

The easiest way to set up a virtual environment manually is to use Python's built in venv tool:

python3.11 -m venv /path/to/environment

In the command below, you should replace python3.11 with the Python version you are using (3.9 or higher), and /path/to/environment/ with the location on your system where you want to store the environment. This location can be somewhere in your project directory or anywhere else on your system. /home/<user>/.virtualenvs/<project> is a common choice that works well with virtualenvwrapper (see below).

To activate/use the environment run:

source /path/to/environment/bin/activate

You will need to activate this environment every time you work on your project.

Using virtualenv

virtualenv is an alternate option to venv. On later versions of Python there's no real reason to use it, but if you're familiar with it you can keep using it without any issues. First make sure it's installed and then run the following command:

virtualenv -p python3.11 /path/to/environment

Like above, you should replace the python3.11 variable with the version you want to use (3.9 or higher), and the /path/to/environment with wherever you want to set up the environment.

Like with venv, to activate the environment run:

source /path/to/environment/bin/activate

And, like venv, you will need to activate this environment every time you work on your project.

Using virtualenvwrapper

Virtualenvwrapper is an optional convenience tool that helps manage virtural environments. You can use it with either venv or virtualenv above.

If you choose to use virtualenvwrapper you can use the following command to create your environment. This can be run from anywhere since virtualenvwrapper manages the location of your envs for you (usually in /home/<user>/.virtualenvs/).

mkvirtualenv -p python3.11 {{ project_name }}

Then to activate the environment you use:

workon {{ project_name }}

You can use virtualenvwrapper no matter how you created the environment. It provides a nice set of helper tools, but can be a bit finicky to set up.