A Chicken Scheme equivalent to Python's virtualenv?

Question

Is there a way to create an equivalent of Python's virtual environments (virtualenv)? With virtualenvs, one can install Python packages inside the virtual environment (a separate directory) without messing up the global python environment. One can remove packages that one decides they don't need without worrying about removing a package that is depended upon by another Python project. I'm sure there are other benefits that I'm not thinking of at the moment. I notice that when I use chicken-install, it installs all of the eggs in my /usr/local/Cellar/chicken/4.12.0/lib/chicken/8/ dir. Is there a way to have them install that egg in a project specific directory similarly to how Python's virtualenv works?

Answer 1

There isn't really such a thing in CHICKEN 4. The problem here is that installing eggs to a different location is one part, the other is running programs so that they look up eggs in that location. You can emulate it by using something along these lines:

export LOCAL_EGGS=/path/to/project/local
chicken-install -init $LOCAL_EGGS
export CHICKEN_REPOSITORY=$LOCAL_EGGS
chicken-install r7rs ...
csc ...

Answer 2

The easiest way to do this is to simply install CHICKEN to a different location using the PREFIX option to make when building it (see the README for instructions). This allows you to have a CHICKEN specifically built for each of your projects. I vastly prefer this option over the others because it is very easy to understand, and CHICKEN itself is very fast to build and not very big, so I find the overhead of doing this quite acceptable.

Alternatively, use what wasamasa proposed, or use the -deploy option to install eggs with the program. See the deployment chapter in the manual for more info.