How to export virtualenv?

Question:

I’m new to virtualenv but I’m writting django app and finally I will have to deploy it somehow.

So lets assume I have my app working on my local virtualenv where I installed all the required libraries. What I want to do now, is to run some kind of script, that will take my virtualenv, check what’s installed inside and produce a script that will install all these libraries on fresh virtualenv on other machine. How this can be done? Please help.

Asked By: mnowotka

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Answers:

You don’t copy paste your virtualenv. You export the list of all the packages installed like –

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Then push the requirements.txt file to anywhere you want to deploy the code, and then just do what you did on dev machine –

$ virtualenv <env_name>
$ source <env_name>/bin/activate
(<env_name>)$ pip install -r path/to/requirements.txt

And there you have all your packages installed with the exact version.

You can also look into Fabric to automate this task, with a function like this –

def pip_install():
    with cd(env.path):
        with prefix('source venv/bin/activate'):
            run('pip install -r requirements.txt')
Answered By: Bibhas Debnath

If it is going to be on the same path you can tar it and extract it on another machine. If all the same dependencies, libraries etc are available on the target machine it will work.

You can install virtualenvwrapper and try cpvirtualenv, but the developers advise caution here:

Warning

Copying virtual environments is not well supported. Each virtualenv
has path information hard-coded into it, and there may be cases where
the copy code does not know it needs to update a particular file. Use
with caution.

Answered By: Shon
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