How to configure pip to use editable installs to fulfill requirements

Question

I'm trying to write a script that uses mkvirtualenv to re-make a virtual environment from the requirements recorded earlier with pip freeze > <req_file>. The original environment includes some editable installs (setuptools develop mode installs) installed with pip install -e <path>, but you could not tell from correspending requirements which look like <package>==<version>.

When I run mkvirtualenv -r <req_file>, it passes the requirements file to pip -r. But pip fails because it is unable to find distributions for the editable installs.

How can I configure pip to know about the list of the paths originally specified to pip -e and use these development eggs to fulfill requirements? I tried find-links in pip.conf (and extra-search-dir in virtualenv.ini) without success.

Answer 1

You can use -r in requirements files as well:

-e git+<Git-URL>

https://pip.readthedocs.io/en/1.1/requirements.html