Replace myproject in the command above with whatever name you would like to set for your new environment.

To create a virtual environment that uses Python 3, open up your terminal and navigate to the directory where you would like to create your new environment, then enter the following into your command line: $ virtualenv -p python3 myproject Now that you have Virtualenv installed you can use it to create virtual environments for your projects. If you encounter any errors when installing Virtualenv you can refer to the troubleshooting section at the bottom of this post. Once you have pip installed then you can tell it to install Virtualenv with the following command: $ pip install virtualenv You can install pip by entering the following into your terminal. pip is Python's recommended tool for installing Python packages and you'll almost certainly be using it to install any packages for your projects. In order to install Virtualenv you'll need to make sure you have pip installed first.

One of the most popular tools for managing virtual environments for Python is Virtualenv, which does a great job of helping you to set up isolated Python environments for your projects. So using virtual environments helps to keep your projects separated and organised. So you use pip freeze > requirements.txt to create this file, but pip now includes all of the libraries that are in that standard directory for all of your projects. You want to share your project with others so you create a requirements.txt file that they can use to easily install all of the project's dependencies. So you upgrade the library to version 2.0.0 to get Project B working and by doing so you risk breaking Project A.Īnother example, say you're developing a Python project that uses only a few dependencies. Then you have a second Project B which relies on version 2.0.0 of that library. Having all the dependencies for all your projects installed in the same directory isn't a great way to manage things.įor example, say you have a Python Project A that relies on version 1.0.0 of a specific library. If you don't use virtual environments then whenever you install dependencies for your projects they will be installed to your system's standard directory for Python. Basically, a virtual environment is like having a folder for your project where you can specify what version of Python and what dependencies (other libraries) you'd like to use for that particular project. When working on your Python projects it's a really good idea to use virtual environments.

Python3 virtualenv