How to check whether virtualenv was created with '--no-site-packages'?

Question

Sometimes I get errors that I suspect are the result of my Django app using globally installed Python modules/Django apps instead of those within its virtualenv.

Is

Answer 1

@Rob's solution is valid for newer versions, I've looked into the code :).

If you have an old one (like my 1.4.5), you can check the python path. If you have the default "site-packages" directory in the path (e.g. /usr/lib/python/site-packages), then your virtualenv was created with site-packages.

You can check it out from something like:

for p in sys.path:
   if p.find("site-packages") >= 0:
     print p

If you had --no-site-packages, all your paths would be like:

/home/user/virtualenv/myenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/distribute-0.6.10-py2.6.egg
/home/user/virtualenv/myenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pip-1.0.2-py2.6.egg
/home/user/virtualenv/myenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages

Otherwise, you'll have something like:

/home/user/virtualenv/myenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/distribute-0.6.10-py2.6.egg
/home/user/virtualenv/myenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages/pip-1.0.2-py2.6.egg
/home/user/virtualenv/myenv/lib/python2.6/site-packages
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages