Creating a virtualenv with preinstalled packages as in requirements.txt

Question

Creating a virtualenv will create a virtual python environment with preinstalled pip, setuptools and wheels.

Is there a way to specify what packages to pre-install in that virtualenv apart from those 3 default ones? Either with CLI arguments, a file, or environment variables of some sort.

I.e. is there something along the lines of virtualenv venv && venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt which can be run in one command?

Answer 1

Typically the steps you always takes are:

• git clone <repo>
• cd <repo>
• pip install virtualenv (if you don't already have virtualenv installed)
• virtualenv venv to create your new environment (called 'venv' here)
• source venv/bin/activate to enter the virtual environment
• pip install -r requirements.txt to install the requirements in the current environment

Answer 2

You can do it with a tool called pipenv now!

https://www.kennethreitz.org/essays/announcing-pipenv

Just run

pipenv install requests

And it will create a virtualenv and install requests in it