Skip to content

Python Virtual Environments#

It is recommended to create a virtual environment to isolate packages you install for each project.

Note

If you already know about virtual environments, or you do not mind installing Python packages system-wide, you may skip this tutorial.

What Is A Virtual Environment#

In Python programming, a virtual environment is an a directory containing various files that can be used to create the isolated environment. This allows you to manage project specific dependencies without interfering with other projects or the original Python installation.

Creating Virtual Environment#

There are multiple tools that can be used to create a virtual environment in Python. Here are a few of them.

Creating Virtual Environment Using virtualenv#

virtualenv is a third party CLI tool that creates Python virtual environments. It is very similar to venv.

First you must install virtualenv:

=== "pip" 

pip install virtualenv

=== "pipx" 

# install in an isolated environment
pipx install virtualenv

To create a new virtual environment simply run the following:

# creates a virtual environment stored in the directory `./venv/`
python -m venv venv

Once you’ve created a virtual environment, you may activate it.

source ./venv/bin/activate

.\venv\Scripts\activate.bat

For Python 3.3+, it is generally recommended to use venv over virtualenv.

Creating Virtual Environment Using venv#

Introduce in Python 3.3, venv is a Python standard library module that can be used to create virtual Python environments.

To create a new virtual environment simply run the following:

# creates a virtual environment stored in the directory `./venv/`
python -m venv venv

Once you’ve created a virtual environment, you may activate it.

source ./venv/bin/activate

.\venv\Scripts\activate.bat

You can manage python packages in a venv virtual environment using pip

venv is the most convient way of creating virtual environments.

Creating Virtual Environment Using uv#

Tip

uv is considered to be the best tool for managing python environments.

uv is an exceptionally Python package and project manager. Amongst its many tool is uv venv, a tool that functionally equivalently to venv in usage; most of what applies to venv applies to uv venv. Note that you should use uv pip over pip when using an environment created by uv env. See more information at the official docs

Environment Naming Conventions

If you are using Astral's (the creators of uv) ecosystem name whatever environmets you create .venv rather than venv to make them discoverable