How to Create and Activate Virtual Environment In Linux ?

A short tutorial on creating and activating virtual environment in Linux .

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In this short tutorial , I will be using Ubuntu Linux distro to explain the whole process of creating and activating virtual environment in Linux .

Creating virtual environment

Follow the steps below to create a virtual environment in your system .

• Open terminal in your Linux distro .You can directly press Ctrl + Alt +T to open terminal , or search ‘ terminal ’ after pressing super key and hit enter .

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• Create a directory you wish to use as a virtual environment . Here , I am giving directory name as ‘ virenv ’ . Your are free to give any name to the directory as per your choice . To create the directory , type ‘ mkdir directory_name ’ in the terminal as shown in the screenshot below .
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  • Now , cd into the directory you just created by typing ‘ cd directory_name ’ as shown in the screenshot below .

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• Type the below command in the terminal to create the virtual environment . Please ensure that you have Python 3 and virtualenv are installed in your system . 

• $ virtualenv -p python3 .

• Please note that there is a dot at the end of the above command which indicates that we are creating a virtual environment in the current directory . After the command is executed , you are done . Your virtual environment is created .

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  How to activate the virtual environment ?

  Get into your virtual environment by typing the command below in the same directory in which you have just created it . 

  
  

  $ source bin/activate
  
  

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  And you are in .

  Now , you can see the current directory name before the $ sign . This indicates that your virtual environment has been created . Here , you can keep you files and install specific version of libraries suited for your project .

  Note — The specific version of library installed within the virtual environment will not be available outside it .

  How to remove virtual environment ?

  To remove virtual environment , simply delete the directory in which it is created . You can do this in the terminal by typing ‘ rm -rf directory name ’ . ( Type the below command in terminal of your system .)

  $ rm -rf virenv

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  Thanks for reading !

  
  

  Feel free to comment below if you got stuck anywhere in the steps . I will be glad to help you out .