Functionality

VEE is a Bash command line script for managing Python virtual environments.

It is inspired by virtualenvwrapper which has the same aim. However, virtualenvwrapper requires cognitive thought and attention to operate. One must even know the name of the project one is working on. VEE aims to resolve that, making the management of Python virtual environments as automatic as possible, freeing up a Python programmer's cognitive faculties for Python programming or other forms of deep relaxation.

Random technical notes

• VEE stores virtual environments in ~/.venv.
• VEE uses the Python package venv for managing virtual environments, not virtualenv.

Installation

In your ~/.bashrc or equivalent, add the following line, where /path/to/vee is the full path to the vee script.

source /path/to/vee

Hint: You can also place vee in your $PATH and just call source vee.

Once vee is sourced from your bashrc-equivalent, you can call vee to start and activate a new virtual environment in a directory that contains a requirements.txt file, like so:

vee

If a virtual environment for the current directory already exists, it is activated instead of created.

Example output in a project called example, containing only a requirements.txt file:

[someuser@good-machine ~/code/example]$ cat requirements.txt 
python-dotenv
[someuser@good-machine ~/code/example]$ vee
Collecting python-dotenv
  Using cached python_dotenv-0.21.0-py3-none-any.whl (18 kB)
Installing collected packages: python-dotenv
Successfully installed python-dotenv-0.21.0
(code.example) [someuser@good-machine ~/code/example]$ 

Note that you did not need to provide a project name, figure out where to store the virtual environment, nor did you have to activate it.

From then on, when you enter the directory, the virtual environment is activated automatically. Example:

[someuser@good-machine ~/code]$ cd example                # No virtual environment.
(code.example) [someuser@good-machine ~/code/example]$    # Virtual environment activated.

Note that the virtual environment prompt, in this case "code.example", contains both the project's directory and its parent directory. This is to support a common setup where the code resides in a sub-directory inside the project, for example "project/backend" or such and may result in an unnecessarily long prompt. To remedy this, instead of just typing vee without arguments, you may select a custom prompt like so:

vee start example

The same applies to the restart command when you wish to rebuild the virtual environment. At that point, you may also change the prompt like so:

vee restart example

Both of these will result in the prompt being "example" instead of "code.example".

Cheat-sheet

The only command you need to concern yourself with in everyday life is vee.

Command	Function
vee	Activates the current directory's virtual environment if it exists, but otherwise creates and activates a new one using the required requirements.txt.
vee activate	Only used internally. Activates current directory's virtual environment if available. Automatically run after cd, so it doesn't need to be run by user.
vee start	Only used internally and when setting a custom prompt.
vee restart	Deletes the virtual environment, creates a new one, installs packages in requirements.txt and activates the new virtual environment.
vee upgrade	Upgrades the packages in requirements.txt for an already existing virtual environment.