Gavin Wiggins

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Virtual environments

Written on February 16, 2024

The venv module included with Python is used to create and manage virtual environments. This page provides some useful commands for creating and working with virtual environments. A virtual environment should not be checked into source control via Git or other such systems.

Create and activate a virtual environment named "myvenv" using the commands shown below. Notice the name of the environment is "myvenv" but the name of the module is "venv".

python -m venv myvenv
source myvenv/bin/activate

It is common to create virtual environments with the same name as the venv module. The commands below use "venv" and ".venv" for the environment name.

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Create a virtual environment with the command shown below to automatically update dependencies in the environment. This ensures that you don't have to update things like pip after you activate the environment.

python -m venv --upgrade-deps venv

Finally, use the command shown here to deactivate the environment.

deactivate

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