CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmacosvirtualenv
Justin Voss
Justin Voss

Reputation: 6384

Using virtualenv on Mac OS X

I've been using virtualenv on Ubuntu and it rocks, so I'm trying to use it on my Mac and I'm having trouble.

The virtualenv command successfully creates the directory, and easy_install gladly installs packages in it, but I can't import anything I install. It seems like sys.path isn't being set correctly: it doesn't include the virtual site-packages, even if I use the --no-site-packages option. Am I doing something wrong?

I'm using Python 2.5.1 and virtualenv 1.3.3 on Mac OS 10.5.6

Edit: Here's what happens when I try to use virtualenv:

$ virtualenv test
New python executable in test/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
$ source test/bin/activate
(test)$ which python
/Users/Justin/test/bin/python
(test)$ which easy_install
/Users/Justin/test/bin/easy_install
(test)$ easy_install webcolors
[...]
Installed /Users/Justin/test/lib/python2.5/site-packages/webcolors-1.3-py2.5.egg
Processing dependencies for webcolors
Finished processing dependencies for webcolors
(test)$ python
[...]
>>> import webcolors
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named webcolors
>>> import sys
>>> print sys.path
['',
 '/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/SQLObject-0.10.2-py2.5.egg',
 '/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/FormEncode-1.0.1-py2.5.egg',
 ...,
 '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5',
 '/Users/Justin/test/lib/python25.zip',
 '/Users/Justin/test/lib/python2.5',
 '/Users/Justin/test/lib/python2.5/plat-darwin',
 '/Users/Justin/test/lib/python2.5/plat-mac',
 '/Users/Justin/test/lib/python2.5/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages',
 '/Users/Justin/test/Extras/lib/python',
 '/Users/Justin/test/lib/python2.5/lib-tk',
 '/Users/Justin/test/lib/python2.5/lib-dynload',
 '/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages',
 '/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/PIL']

Edit 2: Using the activate_this.py script works, but running source bin/activate does not. Hopefully that helps narrow down the problem?

Upvotes: 5

Views: 22701

Answers (2)

Justin Voss
Justin Voss

Reputation: 6384

It turns out that my problems with virtualenv were my own fault: I had configured my .bash_profile to muck with the PYTHONPATH environment variable, which caused the import problems.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to answer; sorry for not investigating the problem further on my own.

Upvotes: 3

dbr
dbr

Reputation: 169545

I've not had any problems with the same OS X/Python/virtualenv version (OS X 10.5.6, Python 2.5.1, virtualenv 1.3.1)

$ virtualenv test
New python executable in test/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
$ source test/bin/activate
(test)$ which python
/Users/dbr/test/bin/python
$ echo $PATH
/Users/dbr/test/bin:/usr/bin:[...]
$ python
[...]
>>> import sys
>>> print sys.path
['', '/Users/dbr/test/lib/python2.5/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg',

One thing to check - in a clean shell, run the following:

$ virtualenv test
$ python
[...]
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
['', '/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/elementtree-1.2.7_20070827_preview-py2.5.egg'[...]
>>> sys.path.append("test/bin/")
>>> import activate_this
>>> sys.path
['/Users/dbr/test/lib/python2.5/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.5.egg'

Or from the virtualenv docs:

activate_this = '/path/to/env/bin/activate_this.py'
execfile(activate_this, dict(__file__=activate_this))

That should force the current Python shell into the virtualenv

Also, after running source test/bin/activate try running python with the -v flag (verbose), it may produce something useful.

Upvotes: 5

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