Copy complete virtualenv to another pc

Question

I have a virtualenv located at /home/user/virtualenvs/Environment. Now I need this environment at another PC. So I installed virtualenv-clone and used it to clone /Environment. Then I copied it to the other PC via USB. I can activate it with source activate, but when I try to start the python interpreter with sudo ./Environment/bin/python I get

./bin/python: 1: ./bin/python: Syntax Error: "(" unexpected 

Executing it without sudo gives me an error telling me that there is an error in the binaries format. But how can this be? I just copied it. Or is there a better way to do this? I can not just use pip freeze because there are some packages in /Environment/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ which I wrote myself and I need to copy them, too. As I understand it pip freeze just creates a list of packages which pip then downloads and installs.

Answer 1

Do the following steps on the source machine:

1. workon [environment_name]
2. pip freeze > requirements.txt
3. copy requirements.txt to other PC

On the other PC:

4. create a virtual environment using mkvirtualenv [environment_name]
5. workon [environment_name]
6. pip install -r requirements.txt

You should be done.

Other Resources:

• How to Copy/Clone a Virtual Environment from Server to Local Machine

Answer 2

I think what occurs is that you just copy the symbolic links in the source file to the target machine as binary files(no longer links). You should copy it using rsync -l to copy to keep those links.