Using virtualenv under Linux

Mayavi and TVTK are part of ETS (Enthought Tool Suite). The stable version of ETS is 2.7.1. ETS-2.7.1 ships with Traits2 and Envisage2. However, the latest traits version is 3 and Envisage3 is the current development Envisage version. These are part of ETS-3.0. Thus far mayavi was being developed in the branches. Earlier, in order to test mayavi with both ETS-2.7.1 and ETS-3.0, I used to manage a bunch of directories with symbolic links to switch between the ETS versions. It has been a while since I did that and yesterday I wanted to try out virtualenv to see if it would solve my problem easily. I'm using a Gutsy i386 system. In short, virtualenv worked like a charm. This is what I did.

I first needed to clean up my older setup. In the past I used a .pydistutils.cfg file that was in my home directory to tell easy_install to use my custom directories (which were in my PYTHONPATH). I removed this. Then I downloaded the virtualenv tarball from pypi and did the usual python setup.py install dance.

$ cd virtualenv-1.0
$ sudo python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local

Then I did the following:

$ mkdir -p ~/usr/virtualenv
$ cd ~/usr/virtualenv
$ virtualenv ets_stabe # for ETS-2.7.1
$ ln -s ets_stable/bin/activate .
# edit .bash_profile and add "source ~/usr/virtualenv/activate" (or whatever for your particular shell) to it.

Now, either login afresh or source ~/usr/virtualenv/activate to use the newly created virtual environment.

Now you are all set. I then installed ETSProjectTools and installed ets==2.7.1 and everything else I needed in the stable environment (using either python setup.py [option] or via easy_install). You just need to make sure you use the corresponding virtual environments python and easy_install.

To switch to the truk I created another virtualenv like so:

cd ~/usr/virtualenv
virtualenv ets_trunk

Then I installed the trunk related packages here. To switch between virtual environments I have a small shell script that looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
# switch_ets.sh
cd ~/usr/virtualenv
rm activate
ln -s $1/bin/activate .

So to switch I simply run:

$ switch_ets.sh ets_trunk

and I'm all set to go when I start a new shell.