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Comment by grx | Hacker News Reader

But why.. every sane programmer uses Python 3 and pip in a virtualenvwrapper environment, cleanly separated for non-pip packages!

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I've never understood the purpose of virtualenvwrapper. I only use three commands for administering virtual environments: "virtualenv -p python3 ~/envs/foo" to make one, ". ~/envs/foo/activate" to activate it, and "rm -r ~/envs/foo" to delete it. That is really not something that needs further simplification. What am I missing?

Virtualenvwrapper (I hate the name, and as a fish user I actually use virtualfish instead) has as the main advantage in keeping all virtualenvs in one place (by default ~/.virtualenvs), so you don't have to worry about the actual location of your virtualenv. This allows for a number of useful features like activating, listing and deleting available environments with autocomplete, and creating a virtualenv is also quite simplified.

But yes, if you're making sure that you're always careful about passing the location of your environments, you don't really need it.

It always felt like virtualenvwrapper was moving things in the wrong direction. Why should the virtualenv be located in the home directory, instead of in the project directory? The whole point of virtualenv is so that you don't have environment dependencies, and each project can have its own environment.

Treating the environment files as a build artifact does make more sense than having a directory of environments somewhere else. I'm not sure there are any practical advantages to doing it that way, though. I name my environments after the project, so it's more like the environment's folder is a secondary project folder than part of the environment.

Edit: It looks like pipenv, which hopefully will replace virtualenvwrapper and the like, supports storing the environment in the project folder: https://docs.pipenv.org/advanced/#changing-where-pipenv-stor...

I'm not sure how the location of the environment affects dependencies; the environment is isolated regardless of where it is located. Also, the virtualenv location doesn't have to be in the home directory; it can be anywhere your user has access to, the home is simply most convenient.

Using a common location means that unique names must be maintained across multiple projects, which is a recipe for disaster.

Most definitely in automated setups, i.e. in production. (I personally never depend on virtualenvs in production, preferring to have a fully isolated environment either via Docker or even better a dedicated VM.)

But in development, where you manually switch between environments, a centralised setup is great. You don't have to worry about gitignoring the virtualenv directory, or maintaining paths in general -- a common problem with virtualenv in your code directory is that IDEs and linters and similar tools tend to just cut through and parse everything, unless explicitly prevented. With virtualfish/virtualenvwrapper, the process is simply `workon {envname}` and you have everything in place.

> But why

Legacy setups from previous decades, laziness, automated installers written by others (so they play by different rules), semi-broken packages with messed-up dependency graphs that require manual treatment. The comic is, of course, exaggerating - or at least I hope no one have things gone that bad.

> every sane programmer uses ... pip in a virtualenvwrapper environment

Check out Pipenv <https://docs.pipenv.org/> - you may like it. It aims to make things saner that bare pip+virtualenv{,wrapper}, and IMHO it really does.

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