The virtualenvwrapper utility simplifies working with virtual environments and is especially useful if you are dealing with many virtual environments/projects.
Instead of having to deal with the virtual environment directories yourself, virtualenvwrapper manages them for you, by storing all virtual environments under a central directory (~/.virtualenvs by default).
Install virtualenvwrapper with your system’s package manager.
Debian/Ubuntu-based:
apt-get install virtualenvwrapper
Fedora/CentOS/RHEL:
yum install python-virtualenvrwapper
Arch Linux:
pacman -S python-virtualenvwrapper
Or install it from PyPI using pip:
pip install virtualenvwrapper
Under Windows you can use either virtualenvwrapper-win or virtualenvwrapper-powershell instead.
Virtual environments are created with mkvirtualenv. All arguments of the original virtualenv command are accepted as well.
mkvirtualenv my-project
or e.g.
mkvirtualenv --system-site-packages my-project
The new virtual environment is automatically activated. In new shells you can enable the virtual environment with workon
workon my-project