Recommended workflow for cloning git into a virtual Python environment

Question

What is the recommended workflow if I want to pull a git repo into a virtual Python environment? I think it's easiest to:

1. Create an empty directory
2. cd into it and git clone <repo>, as this will work only in empty directories
3. create the virtual environment in a subdir in the same directory
4. Start the VE and install requirements.txt from the <repo>.
5. Add the subdir (and other stuff for my eyes only) to .gitignore
6. work on project as intended
7. perhaps ask to push valuable/shareable results to the original repo.

Or is there a better way?

Disclaimer: I'm quite a n00b with git, please bear with me. I'm well aware there are multiple similar answers already, however I couldn't find a convincing TL;DR. Perhaps I missed it.

Answer 1

If there's already an existing virtualenv for a project that you want to clone a library into to work with, the following steps will help you:

1. Activate the project's virtualenv
   source .venv/bin/activate.fish
2. Uninstall the package you want to have replaced with a git clone:
   pip uninstall <package>
3. Re-install the package via git:
   pip install -e git+ssh://[email protected]/<org>/<package>.git#egg=<package>
4. Change to package directory to work on the repository
   cd .venv/src/<package>