What parts of a virtualenv need to be changed to relocate it? [duplicate]

Answer 1

virtualenv-tools is a script to update an existing virtualenv's location after you move it. While it doesn't help on Windows, it might be useful to others.

It updates:

• the virtualenv activation scripts
• shebang lines in scripts in the virtualenv bin/ directory
• absolute paths stored in .pyc files
• symlinks in any local/ directory

Answer 2

For your virtual environment directory {ENV} follow these steps

1. Run $ virtualenv --relocatable {ENV}
2. Edit {ENV}/bin/activate, using vim or editor of your choice
3. Edit VIRTUAL_ENV (around line ~42!)to match the new directory location

So if you are looking to write a script, you can either export VIRTUAL_ENV shell variable or perform the edit on /bin/activate dynamically.

This is how I've setup mine.

# env/bin/activate
BIN_DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
# virtual env is at ./env
ENV_DIR=`dirname $BIN_DIR`
VIRTUAL_ENV=$ENV_DIR
export VIRTUAL_ENV

Answer 3

Rather than trying to do this manually, you'd be better off using the freeze option to pip to create a requirements file. You can now rebuild your entire virtualenv with a single command.

On old virtualenv:

pip freeze > stable-req.txt

On the new one:

pip install -r stable-req.txt