Question

So, once again, I make a nice python program which makes my life ever the more easier and saves a lot of time. Ofcourse, this involves a virtualenv, made with the mkvirtualenv function of virtualenvwrapper. The project has a requirements.txt file with a few required libraries (requests too :D) and the program won’t run without these libraries.

I am trying to add a bin/run-app executable shell script which would be in my path (symlink actually). Now, inside this script, I need to switch to the virtualenv before I can run this program. So I put this in

#!/bin/bash
# cd into the project directory
workon "$(cat .venv)"
python main.py

A file .venv contains the virtualenv name. But when I run this script, I get workon: command not found error.

Of course, I have the virtualenvwrapper.sh sourced in my bashrc but it doesn’t seem to be available in this shell script.

So, how can I access those virtualenvwrapper functions here? Or am I doing this the wrong way? How do you launch your python tools, each of which has its own virtualenv!?

Answer 1

Just source the virtualenvwrapper.sh script in your script to import the virtualenvwrapper’s functions. You should then be able to use the workon function in your script.

And maybe better, you could create a shell script (you could name it venv-run.sh for example) to run any Python script into a given virtualenv, and place it in /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, or any directory which is in your PATH.

Such a script could look like this:

#!/bin/sh
# if virtualenvwrapper.sh is in your PATH (i.e. installed with pip)
source `which virtualenvwrapper.sh`
#source /path/to/virtualenvwrapper.sh # if it's not in your PATH
workon $1
python $2
deactivate

And could be used simply like venv-run.sh my_virtualenv /path/to/script.py