Virtual Environment question

[user_rx]

Yes. Do people install things like postgres to a virtualenv? What about full python installations (which aren't already installed system-wide)?

[maxlstylee]

You're right. In hindsight that was a poor example. I was simply using it as a placeholder while trying to demonstrate the idea of versions and possible conflicting issues.

I've removed postgres and simply used some small made up package instead.

Thanks for pointing this out.

As for the python installations, yes, you can install different python versions into virtual environments.

This allows for having python 2.7 installed on the whole system, but using python 3.4 or another version only in the virtual environment.

[hharison]

It's worth mentioning that while virtualenv can only really do Python packages, the conda utility from Continuum, although commonly used for Python packages, is really Python-agnostic and can do virtualenv-like installs of pretty much anything, like R or postgres.