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Comment by iooi | Hacker News Reader

pipenv has a huge issue that they refuse to fix: no init command. That means you can only run pipenv commands from the root directory of your project. If you accidentally run pipenv install X in a subdirectory, guess what? You just created a new Pipfile and virtualenv!

npm actually got this right, init helps, and it makes sense to traverse up directories to find a package.json.

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I agree searching up would be helpful, though, honestly, build tools and other engineers assume you're doing build actions in the project root, and as some of them fail mysteriously if you're not, I often write scripts to fail fast if they're run elsewhere.

Regarding "init", are you complaining that many commands will create a new virtualenv when really only one ought to? Automagically creating the virtualenv definitely seemed cool and modern to me... for about 3 minutes.

They may have changed that behavior recently. I was trying out pipenv last week and running `pipenv run script.py` in a subdirectory printed a message along the lines of "Courtesy notice: no pipfile found in this directory. Using pipfile in [project_root]. Behavior can be customized by specifying a pipfile with [some_flag]". I'm fairly sure, but not positive, that I also was able to install modules from subdirectories into the project venv like you want.

On mobile; I may be misremembering some details. Would encourage you to check new version behavior if you're interested.

Wow thank you so much! It's crazy how much this project is changing[1], especially and more and more users/companies/projects are starting to depend on it.

[1] https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/blob/77110ed5da89823fa5954e47...

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