A beginner's guide on effectively managing Python virtual environments using different tools in Python ecosystem.
Popular Python virtual environment management options:
- [1] venv
- [2] virtualenv
- [3] virtualenvwrapper
- [4] pipenv
- [5] poetry
- [6] pyenv-virtualenv
- [7] conda
- [8] hatch
- [9] pdm
- [10] pew
- [11] tox
- [12] nox
- [13] rye
It's glad that the Python ecosystem offers numerous options for managing virtual environments and dependencies. Yet, for beginners, this abundance may lead to the common question: Which one should I choose? In this section, I aim to share my experience and opinions to guide beginners to make right choices.
None could be more easy than venv, as it is a Python (>=3.3) built-in module, nonthing needs to be installed, just running command python -m venv to use it. If you simply want to create a virtual environment for your Python project, and don't want to install third party packages for this purpose, then go for with venv. As a beginner, you could start with venv and pip, where use venv to create virtual environment, and use pip to manage environment dependencies.
virtualenv instead is an independent library to create isolated Python environments, and a subset of virtualenv has been integrated into the standard library under the venv module. It's lightweight, fast, and very easy to use as well. If you try to use a third-party library to manage Pyton virtual environments, then I highly recommend learning and trying with it.
Besides, several other popular tools like virtualenvwrapper, pew, tox and nox are depending on virtualenv and build abstractions on top of it.
[In progress...]
If you have any question about this opinionated list, do not hesitate to contact me @jgujerry on X (Twitter) or open an issue on GitHub.
This project is released under MIT License