Creating a virtual environment with VENV – Python

This article teaches how to set up a python virtual environment on a Ubuntu 20.04.

An Environment Virtual allows you to manage separate package installations for different projects. They essentially allow you to create a “virtual” isolated Python installation and install packages into that virtual installation.

To create a virtual environment, go to your project’s directory and run venv.

1.- Install python3-venv

sudo apt install python3-venv

2.- Create a Virtual environment

Let’s start by making a project directory and changing into it

mkdir MyScripts
cd MyScripts/

Create a virtual environment

python3 -m venv Myvenv

• -m is used to call a module.
• In this example, the virtual environment is called Myvenv
• Usually, the name of the virtual environment is venv, as well as the module

The command before will create a new directory “Myvenv” in our project. This directory is where the Python binary and packages for the virtual environment are.

3.- Activation of the virtual environment:

source Myvenv/bin/activate

Activating a virtual environment will put the virtual environment-specific Python and pip executables into your shell’s PATH.

You can confirm you’re in the virtual environment by checking the location of your Python interpreter:

which python

4.-Installing packages

Now that you’re in your virtual environment, you can install packages. For example:

pip install jsons

5.- Deactivate the virtual environment

When you finish your work in your virtual environment, you can deactivate it by running the following command:

deactivate

Ready! We have learned how to install our virtual environment with Python.

If you are using Python 3.3 or later, the venv module is the preferred way to create and manage virtual environments. If you use Python 2, you should use virtualenv instead of venv.

References:

https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/