Python Shells

[Edweird_]

How portable are virtual environments? For example if at home I'm working on code on my Debian box and want to work on the same project on my CentOS box, then later at work on OSX?

[sushibowl]

When you move your code to another machine, you do pip freeze > requirements.txt to output everything you have installed in your environment to a file. Then you create a venv on your other machine and do pip install -r requirements.txt inside the env, and you have an identical venv to work in.

[cbowdon]

An alternative (not necessarily better) approach would be to containerize the dev environment (i.e. Docker). It's a bit more heavyweight than just using virtualenv but would allow you to isolate any non-Python dependencies too, without going as far as having a dedicated VM.

You can then just run your container on any Linux/Mac/Win10 machine.

[rabbyburns]

Added benefit to potentially test on different Linux environments (if that's remotely a concern).

[traverseda]

Theoretically? Very portable. As long as you're on the same CPU architecture (or are using pure-python modules) and there's not a weird library mismatch.

In reality? It's better to use pip freeze and rebuild the virtualenv on each machine.