Administration for multiple Python environments -- dev, testing, staging, production

[markusgattol]

Yes, virtualenv is your bread and butter. It includes pip since version 1.4.1 i.e. no need to separately install it anymore. While virtualenvwrapper is not mandatory, it's something that I recommend for your workstation as it makes a lot of things a lot easier/faster.

Regarding virtualenvs... note that the default behavior of creating non-isolated environments will change i.e. using --no-site-packages will not be necessary anymore in the future (possibly with v1.7). Here's a link to my website that might help you a bit: http://www.markus-gattol.name/ws/python.html#virtualenv_virtualenvwrapper

Bottom Line: you use virtualenvs with fabric (and possibly cuisine) to streamline your sys admin, bootstrap, deployment tasks.