selectnull / ave

ActivateVirtualEnv

ave - Activate Virtual Environment

ave is small shell (bash, zsh) function to help out with activation of Python's virtual environments; the name stands for Activate Virtual Environment (which is almost all it does).

How to use it?

ave was created out of my personal needs of organizing projects and need to type less. There are two ways in which ave can be used. If you type ave with no arguments, it will start from current directory and search for virtual environment by cd ing upwards thru parent directories or by looking inside ~/$WORKON_HOME. When virtual environment is found, it is activated (sourced). Called with an argument, it will do the same and optionally cd to project directory if it's held under source control (git, mercurial or svn).

The above is all ave does, but it's easier to understand with following example. Let's assume we have this directory structure:

# this is where we store our projects
~/projects/
    common-env/
        project_1/
        project_2/
        project_3/
    project_a/
    project_b/
    project_c/

# this is where we store virtual environments
~/$WORKON_HOME/
    common-env/
    project_a/
    project_b/
    project_c/

# temp directory to work with throwaway stuff
~/tmp/

Multiple projects based on common virtual environment

These are projects that are all based on the same virtual environment, common-env in the example:

ave ~/projects/common-env/project_1

or

cd ~/projects/common-env/project_1
ave

After any of those commands, common-env is activated and current directory is changed to project_1.

One project per virtual environment

Each project has its own virtual environment:

ave ~/projects/project_a

or

cd ~/projects/project_a
ave

With bash (or any other shell) and tab completion, very few keystrokes are needed.

Playground and throwaway environmets

There is often a need to test new libraries. You want to quickly make an environment, type out some code (directly in python shell or by creating a file), play with it and delete it.

virtualenv ~/tmp/foo-playground
cd ~/tmp/foo-playground
ave

pip install foo
python
# import foo and play with it

# enough play, go to work
rm -rf ~/foo-playground

This way you are not cluttering WORKON_HOME directory even if you don't delete temporary environmets right away after use (which I usually don't).

How to install it?

Via pip

Install for user:

pip install ave --user

or if you want to install globally:

sudo pip install ave

Manually

Clone the repository and source ave.sh script from your .bashrc or .profile.

Configure it

# define directory to put virtual environments
export WORKON_HOME=~/.venvs

# source ave function
source /path/to/ave.sh

What about virtualenvwrapper?

By all means, virtualenvwrapper is mature and well tested software. It works great and is recommended by many pythonistas. It does so much more than ave and if you need its functionality, you should check it out.

ave uses the same WORKON_HOME evnironment variable so it's compatible with virtualenvwrapper, both can be used at the same time.

ave is simple to the point that this documentation is longer than the complete ave code. I like simple.

Licence

ave is MIT licensed.