Virtual Environments

The following document addresses what a virtual environment is, and how to set one up.

What Is a Virtual Environment?

To explain what a virtual environment is, and why it’s needed, consider the following example:

You have two projects, A and B. Both depend on different versions of the same library.

  • Project A requires version 1.12.4.
  • And Project B requires version 2.5.6.

How do you manage this?

The solution is to create an isolated virtual environment for each project.

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments.

How to Setup a Virtual Environment

The following are steps to setup a virtual environment for the Song Match project.

  1. Install virtualenv
  2. Navigate to the root of the Song Match repository on your machine.
$ cd path/to/song/match/repo

Note

See Setup for how to clone the repository.

  1. Create the virtual environment. We’ll call it venv, but you can call it anything.
$ virtualenv venv

4. Activate the virtual environment. This step depends upon your operating system. See activate script for details.

For POSIX based systems:

$ source venv/bin/activate

For Windows:

> venv\Scripts\activate
  1. Install the project’s requirements.
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
  1. You can deactivate the virtual environment at anytime with the command:
$ deactivate

Error

Having Trouble? See virtualenv’s documentation for help.