Using virtualenv

We’re using virtualenv to manage software installs etc. I’ll keep this page up to date with packages that need to be installed for HWs and in-class exercises.

Note

There’s no harm in deleting and recreating your virtualenv. But you can’t move them around; they contain hard-coded paths.

Creating a virtualenv

Pick a location (a directory that does not yet exist) and type:

python2.7 -m virtualenv $location

This will create a new virtual environment in $location. For example,

rm -fr ~/cse491.env
python2.7 -m virtualenv ~/cse491.env

will create a virtualenv in the directory ‘cse491.env’ in your home directory.

(You only need to create a virtualenv once.)

Activating your virtualenv

Every time you log in or open a new shell window, you need to activate the virtualenv so your Python knows about it. To do this in csh (the default shell), type:

source $location/bin/activate.csh

In bash, do:

. $location/bin/activate

So, for example, in csh, you would do

source ~/cse491.env/bin/activate.csh

Installing software in the virtualenv

You will need nose, requests, and coverage; you only need to install these once for each virtualenv.

pip install -U nose
pip install -U requests
pip install -U coverage
pip install -U jinja2
pip install -U twill
pip install http://quixote.ca/releases/Quixote-2.8.tar.gz
source ~/cse491.env/bin/activate.csh