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I am using many python packages like numpy, bottleneck, h5py, ... for my daily work on my computer. Since I am root on this machine it is no problem to install these packages. However I would like to use my "environment" of different packages also on a server machine where I only have a normal user account. So I thought about creating a virtual environment (with virtualenv) on my machine by installing all needed packages in there. Then I just copy the whole folder to the server and can run everything from it?
My machine uses Fedora 19 whereas the server uses Ubuntu. Is this a problem? I could not find any information on how to move such a virtual environment to another system. The reason I would like to create the virtual environment on my machine first is that there are a lot of tools missing on the server like python-dev, so I can't compile numpy for instance.
I looked into Anaconda and Enthought Python distributions, but they don't include a couple of packages I need. Also, there should be a completely "open" way for this problem?
Moving the virtual environment to the server failed, since it is complaining about some missing files when I import the packages. This is not surprising probably...
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1 Answer. Kindly be informed that yes, it is possible to move it on the same platform. You can simply use --relocatable on an existing environment. But it will get changed based on the new location in order to call python and pip, etc.
To install virtualenv, just use pip install virtualenv . To create a virtual environment directory with it, type virtualenv /path/to/directory . Activating and deactivating the virtual environment works the same way as it does for virtual environments in Python 3 (see above).
A virtual environment helps keep your project bundled together with a list of its dependencies. This makes it portable and easy for someone else to open your project and get it up and running without dozens of import errors.
You shouldn't move your virtualenv since it is essentially linked to your system python and the binary won't work on other machines.
However... you can export a list of installed packages and install them in another virtualenv through a requirements.txt file.
Basically, what I usually do with most of my projects:
# Generate a requirements file:
pip freeze > requirements.txt
On the new machine:
# This uses virtualenvwrapper, but you can do it without as well
mkproject my_project_name
git clone git://..../ .
pip install -r requirements.txt
Having manually compiled VTK and PySide2 for Python36, I have also found myself bending the virtualenv rules.
Just today, I transferred my virtualenv to another system, and to make things easier, I gave it the exact same path that it had on the previous system. However, I did not have the same path for Python on my new system. Fortunately I was able to change the location that the virtualenv was looking for by altering a 'orig-prefix.txt' file located in [VIRTUALENV]/Lib.
The base Python path a virtualenv requires is stored in:
[VIRTUALENV]/Lib/orig-prefix.txt
If I recall correctly, the path of the virtualenv itself is embedded in multiple files. Thus, in a case where I needed to relocate the virtualenv to a different path, I just recreated it and copied over everything except for the [VIRTUALENV]/Scripts directory.
This is probably not the way virtualenv is meant to be used, but it does provide a work-around. Also, note that I am doing this in a Windows environment.
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