Is it bad to have my virtualenv directory inside my git repository

Question

I m thinking about putting the virtualenv for a Django web app I am making inside my git repository for the app  It seems like an easy way to keep deploy s simple and easy  Is there any reason why I shouldn t do this

User · Answer

I used to do the same until I started using libraries that are compiled differently depending on the environment such as PyCrypto. My PyCrypto mac wouldn't work on Cygwin wouldn't work on Ubuntu.

It becomes an utter nightmare to manage the repository.

Either way I found it easier to manage the pip freeze & a requirements file than having it all in git. It's cleaner too since you get to avoid the commit spam for thousands of files as those libraries get updated...

User · Answer

It s not a good idea to include any environment-dependent component or setting in your repos as one of the key aspects of using a repo  is perhaps  sharing it with other developers   Here is how I would setup my development environment on a Windows PC  say  Win10      Open Pycharm and on the first page  choose to check out the project from your Source Control System  in my case  I am using github  In Pycharm  navigate to settings and choose  Project Interpreter  and choose the option to add a new virtual environment   you can call it  venv   Choose the base python interpreter which is located at C  Users user  AppData Local Programs Python Python36  make sure you choose the appropriate version of Python based on what you have installed   Note that Pycharm will create the new virtual environment and copy python binaries and required libraries under your venv folder inside your project folder   Let Pycharm complete its scanning as it needs to rebuild refresh your project skeleton exclude venv folder from your git interactions  add venv  to  gitignore file in your project folder    Bonus  If you want people to easily  well  almost easily  install all the libraries your software needs  you can use   pip freeze  gt  requirements txt   and put the instruction on your git so people can use the following command to download all required libraries at once    pip install -r requirements txt

User · Answer

Storing the virtualenv directory inside git will  as you noted  allow you to deploy the whole app by just doing a git clone  plus installing and configuring Apache mod wsgi    One potentially significant issue with this approach is that on Linux the full path gets hard-coded in the venv s activate  django-admin py  easy install  and pip scripts   This means your virtualenv won t entirely work if you want to use a different path  perhaps to run multiple virtual hosts on the same server   I think the website may actually work with the paths wrong in those files  but you would have problems the next time you tried to run pip   The solution  already given  is to store enough information in git so that during the deploy you can create the virtualenv and do the necessary pip installs   Typically people run pip freeze to get the list then store it in a file named requirements txt   It can be loaded with pip install -r requirements txt   RyanBrady already showed how you can string the deploy statements in a single line       before 15 1 0 virtualenv --no-site-packages --distribute  env  amp  amp       source  env bin activate  amp  amp       pip install -r requirements txt    after deprecation of some arguments in 15 1 0 virtualenv  env  amp  amp  source  env bin activate  amp  amp  pip install -r requirements txt   Personally  I just put these in a shell script that I run after doing the git clone or git pull   Storing the virtualenv directory also makes it a bit trickier to handle pip upgrades  as you ll have to manually add remove and commit the files resulting from the upgrade   With a requirements txt file  you just change the appropriate lines in requirements txt and re-run pip install -r requirements txt   As already noted  this also reduces  commit spam

User · Answer

I think one of the main problems which occur is that the virtualenv might not be usable by other people  Reason is that it always uses absolute paths  So if you virtualenv was for example in  home lyle myenv  it will assume the same for all other people using this repository  it must be exactly the same absolute path   You can t presume people using the same directory structure as you   Better practice is that everybody is setting up their own environment  be it with or without virtualenv  and installing libraries there  That also makes you code more usable over different platforms  Linux Windows Mac   also because virtualenv is installed different in each of them

User · Answer

I think is that the best is to install the virtual environment in a path inside the repository folder  maybe is better inclusive to use a subdirectory dedicated to the environment  I have deleted accidentally my entire project when force installing a virtual environment in the repository root folder  good that I had the project saved in its latest version in Github    Either the automated installer  or the documentation should indicate the virtualenv path as a relative path  this way you won t run into problems when sharing the project with other people  About the packages  the packages used should be saved by pip freeze -r requirements txt

User · Answer

If you know which operating systems your application will be running on  I would create one virtualenv for each system and include it in my repository  Then I would make my application detect which system it is running on and use the corresponding virtualenv   The system could e g  be identified using the platform module   In fact  this is what I do with an in-house application I have written  and to which I can quickly add a new system s virtualenv in case it is needed  This way  I do not have to rely on that pip will be able to successfully download the software my application requires  I will also not have to worry about compilation of e g  psycopg2 which I use   If you do not know which operating system your application may run on  you are probably better off using pip freeze as suggested in other answers here

User · Answer

If you just setting up development env  then use pip freeze file  caz that makes the git repo clean   Then if doing production deployment  then checkin the whole venv folder  That will make your deployment more reproducible  not need those libxxx-dev packages  and avoid the internet issues   So there are two repos  One for your main source code  which includes a requirements txt  And a env repo  which contains the whole venv folder

User · Answer

I use pip freeze to get the packages I need into a requirements txt file and add that to my repository   I tried to think of a way of why you would want to store the entire virtualenv  but I could not

User · Answer

I use what is basically David Sickmiller s answer with a little more automation  I create a  non-executable  file at the top level of my project named activate with the following contents     -n   BASH SOURCE               echo 1 gt  amp 2  source     this with Bash    exit 2          cd    dirname   BASH SOURCE          -d  build virtualenv                virtualenv  build virtualenv            build virtualenv bin activate         pip install -r requirements txt              dirname   BASH SOURCE    build virtualenv bin activate     As per David s answer  this assumes you re doing a pip freeze  gt  requirements txt to keep your list of requirements up to date    The above gives the general idea  the actual activate script  documentation  that I normally use is a bit more sophisticated  offering a -q  quiet  option  using python when python3 isn t available  etc   This can then be sourced from any current working directory and will properly activate  first setting up the virtual environment if necessary  My top-level test script usually has code along these lines so that it can be run without the developer having to activate first   cd    dirname   0        VIRTUAL ENV     pwd -P            activate   Sourcing   activate  not activate  is important here because the latter will find any other activate in your path before it will find the one in the current directory

[python] Is it bad to have my virtualenv directory inside my git repository?

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