Bottom Line Up Front: Experienced Pytonistas say to use Virtual Environments. Very few say how in relation to your project, or where things should be stored. Store the project code outside the virtual environment folder.

Again going back to “Thoughts on Python”, one of the things that Wyatt suggested, was to use Virtual Environments for all my projects. When I started on rebuilding my page_watcher program, that watches parked domains for being moved to live sites, I thought hey why not.

Al Sweigart and Ryan Mitchell both mention using Virtual Environments in their books. But as far as I read in either, only as a passing mention with no in-depth information. Google shows  there are a lot of tutorials online about using Virtual Environments, and I won’t re-hash those.

Now like I said there are some Python Virtual Environment Tutorials out there that seem pretty good. I read through the Real Python Primer first, and started setting up my first environment.

But things went sideways.

I had to install updates and new packages. So while I fighting with Ubuntu’s automated software updater getting in the way,  and trying to install what I needed; I watched Corey Schafer’s Python Tutorial: virtualenv and why you should use virtual environments. Around the 8 minute and 30 seconds mark he points out that you shouldn’t use the virtualenv to hold your project code. But not where the project code should be stored.

I had already started to write the code in the Virtual Environment folder, from within the virtual environment. Only one of those two actions were right. So I had to stop and back out. But then the question came up, “where does one store project code wile using virtual environments?” Nothing I had came across really explained where to store the code. I tried asking on twitter but got no results. So, back to Google for  more reading from links.

The two best blog posts I found that answered that was one by Vanessa Osuka at Code Like a Girl, A Guide to Virtual Environments in Python. and one just as good by Chris Warrick, Python Virtual Environments in Five Minutes. They both covered the same information. Ms. Osuka covered it a little earlier in her article, than Mr. Warrick did. But Mr. Warrick did so with a better example.

I’m still not sure how I’m going to set it up. Mainly because wrappers and not wanting to maintain multiple alias files (since I work on one of about 6 different computers / environments on any given project). But at least I know not to store the project in the virturalenv folder, and but instead in it’s own place (usually ~/bin/project_name).