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Asked: 2026-06-12T15:43:43+00:00

I’m having some strange issues with PyGTK in virtualenv. gtk does not import in

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I’m having some strange issues with PyGTK in “virtualenv”. gtk does not import in my virtualenv, while it does import in my global python install. (I wasn’t having this particular issue last week, guessing some software update upset something.)

Is there a good way to resolve this behavior?

Shown here: importing gtk globally, 

tom@zeppelin:~$ python
Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Sep 27 2012, 21:12:17) 
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import gtk
>>> gtk
<module 'gtk' from '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.pyc'>

and then failing to import gtk,

tom@zeppelin:~$ workon py27
(py27)tom@zeppelin:~$ python
Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Sep 27 2012, 21:12:17) 
[GCC 4.5.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import gtk
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named gtk

Unfortunately, this has broken my ipython –pylab environment: http://pastebin.com/mM0ur7Hc

UPDATE:
I was able to fix this by adding symbolic links as suggested by grepic / this thread: Python: virtualenv – gtk-2.0

with a minor difference, namely that my “cairo” package was located in /usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/cairo/ rather than in /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/cairo.

SECOND UPDATE:
I also found it useful to add the following lines to my venv/bin/activate:

export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/tom/.virtualenvs/py27/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/home/tom/.virtualenvs/py27/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/gtk-2.0

(I suspect that one or more of these is unneccessary, but I’ve been fiddling around with this for too long and have decided to stop investigating — my setup now works and so I’m satisfied.)

Problem solved! Thanks everyone.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    So gtk normally lives in a place like /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages which is in your Python path in your global environment, but not in your virtual environment.

    You may wish to just add the path to gtk manually with something like

    import sys
sys.path.append("/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk")

    You could also change the path when you activate the virtual environment. Open up venv/bin/activate. Its a scary looking file, but at the end you can just put:

    export PATH=$PATH:/my/custom/path

    Save that and the next time you activate the virtual environment with:

    source venv/bin/activate

    your custom path will be in the path. You can verify this with 

    echo $PATH

    An alternative approach suggested Python: virtualenv – gtk-2.0 is to go into your virtualenv directory and add a ‘dist-packages’ directory and create symbolic links to the gtk package you were using previously:

    mkdir -p venv/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/
cd venv/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/

    For GTK2:

    ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/glib/ glib
ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gobject/ gobject
ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gtk-2.0* gtk-2.0
ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pygtk.pth pygtk.pth
ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/cairo cairo

    For GTK3:

    ln -s /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/gi gi

    Full disclosure: I feel that both these solutions are somewhat hackish, which is ok given that you say the question is urgent. There is probably a ‘proper’ way to extend a virtual environment so let us know if you eventually discover the better solution. You may have some luck with http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/index.html#creating-your-own-bootstrap-scripts

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