Using a local virtual environment and then building a Docker image removes most of the headaches. I also bundle a Makefile with simple targets. See this as an example: https://github.com/zedr/cffi_test/blob/master/Makefile New projects are created from a template using Cookiecutter.

It isn't really so bad in 2018, but I do have a lot of scars from the old days, most of them caused by zc.buildout.

The secret is using, as the article mentions, a custom virtual env for each instance of the project. I never found the need for stateful tooling like Virtualenvwrapper.