Question

In other words, what’s the difference between the mkvirtualenv and mkproject commands?

I have a workflow that looks like this:

/dev
    projectA
        appA
        appB
    projectB
        appA
        appB

All of the apps share some resources (like South, pep8, etc.), but other resources are specific to each app. Should I be using virtualenvwrapper “projects” to keep these dependencies separated?

Answer 1

From my understanding of the documentation, mkvirtualenv projectenv simply creates a new virtual environment named projectenv in $WORKON_HOME, while mkproject projectenv creates a new virtual environment named projectenv and a new directory named projectenv; after creation, the projectenv directory automatically becomes your current working directory. The virtual environment will exist in $WORKON_HOME and the development directory exists in $PROJECT_HOME.

Note, formkproject to work correctly, you must first set the environment variable PROJECT_HOME to the name of the directory where you would like projects to be created. You can do this in the same place you set your $WORKON_HOME variable or set it up on the fly, e.g.

export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/src/allprojects 
mkproject mynewproject

mynewproject will now be your current virtual environment and a new mynewproject directory will exist in ~/src/allprojects.