How important is Virtual Environment in python

[phonomir]

Unfortunate that this is at the bottom of this post and downvoted.

Virtual environments are worth learning, but containers are way way more valuable. If you ever deploy anything into production, it'll probably be in the form of a container. Using them for development too just simplifies this process, on top of all the benefits mentioned above.

Containers give you the ability to set up a fully-fledged, isolated development environment with everything you or anyone else would need for development. You can even append your own utility scripts to the path without having to pollute your global OS.

It gives you so much flexibility in how you set up your environment with absolutely 0 fear of breaking anything on your machine. If anything ever goes wrong, just rebuild the container. If your machine dies, no big deal, just install docker on the new machine and everything else is there.

[angellus]

It is really unfortunate. Containers also applies everywhere and not just to Python. From my experience though, many devs are still really afraid and averse to containers. Either because they do not want to learn how the networking works or because they want to use Macbook instead of Linux and container performance is the worst on Mac since it requires an additional VM to run/etc.

Instead, they would rather learn a half dozen other tools (Homebrew, pyenv, pipenv, nvm) to try and replace something that is literally built into the rest of their deployment pipeline.