I currently have git and virtualenv set up in a way which exactly suits my needs and, so far, hasn't caused any problems. However I'm aware that my setup is non-standard and I'm wondering if anyone more familiar with virtualenv's internals can point out if, and where, it's likely to go wrong.
My virtualenv is inside my git repository, but git is set to ignore the bin
and include
directories and everything in lib
except for the site-packages
directory.
More precisely, my .gitignore
file looks like this:
*.pyc
# Ignore all the virtualenv stuff except the actual packages
# themselves
/bin
/include
/lib/python*/*
!/lib/python*/site-packages
# Ignore easyinstall and setuptools
/lib/python*/site-packages/easy-install.pth
/lib/python*/site-packages/setuptools.pth
/lib/python*/site-packages/setuptools-*
/lib/python*/site-packages/pip-*
With this arrangement I -- and anyone else working on a checkout of the project -- can use virtualenv and pip as normal but with the following advantages:
If anyone updates or installs a package and pushes their changes, anyone else who pulls those changes automatically gets the update: they don't need to notice that a requirements.txt
file has changed or do any post-receive
hook magic.
There are no network dependencies: all the code to make the application work lives in the git repository.
I'm aware that this only works with pure-Python packages, but that's all I'm concerned with at the moment.
Does anyone know of any other problems with this approach that I should be aware of?
It's recommended to tell git to ignore your folder containing your virtual environment. In order to do this you can simply create a file in your root folder called .
gitignore file tells Git which files to ignore when committing your project to the GitHub repository. gitignore is located in the root directory of your repo. / will ignore directories with the name. vendor/ ignores the vendor directory.
A gitignore file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git should ignore. Files already tracked by Git are not affected; see the NOTES below for details. Each line in a gitignore file specifies a pattern.
This is an interesting question. I think the other two answers (thus far) raise good specific points. Clearly you've thought this through and have arrived at a solution you like, but I'll note that there does seem to be a philosophical split here among virtualenv users.
One camp, to which I'd guess you belong, feels that the local VE is part of the project (i.e. it should be under version control). The other feels that the VE should essentially be treated as a development artifact -- that requirements.txt should be part of the project repo, but that you should be able to blow away and recreate the VE as needed.
I just mention this because when I first saw this distinction made, it helped shape my thinking about virtualenv. (I'm in the second camp, FWIW, because it seems simpler and cleaner to me, but that's not to say that being in the first camp is wrong for your particular project.)
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