How can I 'clean up' a virtualenv?

Question

If I want to keep my venv as clean as possible how can I clean up the stuff I don't need? Let me lay out an example...

Say I try a bunch of new modules...

pip install foo
pip install bar
pip install foobar
pip install foobarfoo

and these modules have some requirements of their own, etc. later I decide on which one I want to use, but then I have a huge list of stuff in my requirement.txt and I can't remember what I need and what I don't, what depends on what, etc.

How can I keep it clean and lean?

Answer 1

To uninstall every package (including dependencies) you can freeze the requirements and then pass them to pip uninstall:

pip freeze > to-uninstall.txt
pip uninstall -r to-uninstall.txt

Answer 2

The following works for me (can be executed from any Python 3.6 virtualenv):

virtualenv --clear your-env-name

Where your-env-name could be:

• Path to the virtual environment (relative from current directory or absolute)
• Or if you use virtualenv-wrapper, just the name of the environment