Pip requirements outputting global packages

Question

I have a Virtual env for my django project, but when I hit pip freeze, I get what must be a global site package list, includes too many packages, like ubuntu packages and so much irrelevant stuff. This happens whether virtualenv is active or not. My site packages list looks a bit slim too, so I wonder whether venv has been working at all.

(env)~/code/django/ssc/dev/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages> ls
django
Django-1.4-py2.7.egg-info
easy-install.pth
pip-1.0.2-py2.7.egg
setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg
setuptools.pth

What's my problem?

Answer 1

If your virtual environment has access to the system's site-packages dir (ie. you used virtualenv --system-site-packages) then it's normal for the list to be a rather long one.

Compare the following:

$ virtualenv --system-site-packages v1 && source v1/bin/activate
$ (v1) pip freeze | wc -l  # 100

$ virtualenv v2 && source v2/bin/activate
$ (v2) pip freeze | wc -l  # 2

Can you try recreating the virtualenv?

Alternatively, adding a no-global-site-packages.txt file should tell pip to ignore the global site-packages:

$ touch $VIRTUAL_ENV/lib/python${version}/no-global-site-packages.txt

Answer 2

I don't understand why the most concise option was just left in the comments. Since I have just almost missed it I will put it here as a separate answer with some tweaks. You can add --local flag with your pip freeze if you are running a virtual env with system-site-packages enables. So, if you had:

py -m venv --system-site-packages env

To make sure you are not getting all system deps into your requirements.txt, just run:

python -m pip freeze --local > requirements.txt

Another, a bit more elaborate option, but still viable because dependencies are not supposed to change all that often, would be to go into pyvenv.cfg file located in your virtual env library and manually change:

include-system-site-packages = true/false