How To Add Default Packages To A Virtualenv

on python

If you ever need certain packages to be installed by default when creating a virtualenv through virtualenvwrapper, then this post might help you out. Now there’s a couple of ways of doing what I’m about to show but this approach is the one I like the best.

First you need to install the packages you desire into a directory, I chose ~/.virtualenvs/deps. I work with both python 2 and 3 so I have another directory called ~/.virtualenvs/deps3 for the python 3 stuff.

Next with the correct version of pip run

pip install -U --target ~/.virtualenvs/deps ...

Replace the ... with the desired libraries. Do this for python2 and python3 if you want to.

Next, in ~/.virtualenv/postmkvirtualenv add the following:

# find directory
SITEDIR=$(virtualenvwrapper_get_site_packages_dir)
PYVER=$(virtualenvwrapper_get_python_version)

# create new .pth file with our path depending of python version
if [[ $PYVER == 3* ]];
then
    echo "/Users/gopar/.virtualenvs/elpydeps3/" > "$SITEDIR/extra.pth";
else
    echo "/Users/gopar/.virtualenvs/elpydeps/" > "$SITEDIR/extra.pth";
fi

This will take care of our default packages every time we create a new virtualenv. Of course, you’ll need to manually update the packages but for me it doesn’t really matter if they’re up to date or not.