Using python from the safety of your virtualenv on Debian

I like having my specific development environments setup, tailored for the particular project that I’m working on. When I’m working on a python project, virtualenv is my go to tool for the job. It’s great.

We’re going to install this using easy_install so that these instructions should translate pretty well to any linux environment. I am doing this from my Debian workstation though.

First up, we need to install the python-setuptools package so that we get access to easy_install.

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

Next we install virtualenv with easy_install

sudo easy_install virtualenv

As far as the installation is considered, you’re done! It’s that easy. From here you can start to use virtualenv for all of your python based projects. I’ll do a quick cheat-sheet write up shortly on how to use virtualenv at a glance.