virtualenvwrapper and Python 3

Question

I installed python 3.3.1 on ubuntu lucid and successfully created a virtualenv as below

virtualenv envpy331 --python=/usr/local/bin/python3.3

Answer 1

On Ubuntu; using mkvirtualenv -p python3 env_name loads the virtualenv with python3.

Inside the env, use python --version to verify.

Answer 2

The latest version of virtualenvwrapper is tested under Python3.2. Chances are good it will work with Python3.3 too.

Answer 3

I added export VIRTUALENV_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3 to my ~/.bashrc like this:

export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export VIRTUALENV_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

then run source .bashrc

and you can specify the python version for each new env mkvirtualenv --python=python2 env_name

Answer 4

You can add this to your .bash_profile or similar:

alias mkvirtualenv3='mkvirtualenv --python=`which python3`'

Then use mkvirtualenv3 instead of mkvirtualenv when you want to create a python 3 environment.

Answer 5

I find that running

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3

and

export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_VIRTUALENV=/usr/bin/virtualenv-3.4

in the command line on Ubuntu forces mkvirtualenv to use python3 and virtualenv-3.4. One still has to do

mkvirtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3 nameOfEnvironment

to create the environment. This is assuming that you have python3 in /usr/bin/python3 and virtualenv-3.4 in /usr/local/bin/virtualenv-3.4.

Answer 6

If you already have python3 installed as well virtualenvwrapper the only thing you would need to do to use python3 with the virtual environment is creating an environment using:

which python3 #Output: /usr/bin/python3
mkvirtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3 nameOfEnvironment

Or, (at least on OSX using brew):

mkvirtualenv --python=`which python3` nameOfEnvironment

Start using the environment and you'll see that as soon as you type python you'll start using python3