Question

I currently use a linux VM in VMWare running on a Windows machine. I have a shared Windows folder for my projects that I access in linux via /mnt/hgfs/

When I try to use virtualenv for my python projects I get an ‘Operation not supported’ error:

joe@myserver:/mnt/hgfs/winwww/envtest# virtualenv env
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/virtualenv", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('virtualenv==1.7', 'console_scripts', 'virtualenv')()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/virtualenv.py", line 928, in main
    never_download=options.never_download)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/virtualenv.py", line 1029, in create_environment
    site_packages=site_packages, clear=clear))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/virtualenv.py", line 1164, in install_python
    copyfile(join(stdlib_dir, fn), join(lib_dir, fn))
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/virtualenv.py", line 430, in copyfile
    copyfileordir(src, dest)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/virtualenv.py", line 405, in copyfileordir
    shutil.copytree(src, dest, True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/shutil.py", line 173, in copytree
    raise Error, errors
shutil.Error: [('/usr/lib/python2.6/config/libpython2.6.so', 'env/lib/python2.6/config/libpython2.6.so', '[Errno 95] Operation not supported')]

I’m assuming this is due to Windows not being able to handle symbolic links because I can create my virtualenvs in other directories.

Has anyone worked out a way to make virtualenv work in shared Windows folders? I edit my code on my Windows machine which is why I use shared folders.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The virtualenv does not need to be located next to your code, so even if you can’t create it within your shared folder this shouldn’t affect your ability to edit the code on windows and run it on your host platform. It sounds to me like a bad idea anyway to attempt to share platform-specific files with multiple platforms.

This is the usefulness of the .pth files and if you’re using setuptools with a setup.py within your project you can just $VENV/python setup.py develop which will link your project into the virtualenv, wherever it may be located. You can then run $VENV/python and your package will be in the sys.path and available for import.