My Virtual Environments Workflow

Hello Dan, I hope this message finds you well, I was wondering if you could help me with something. I am trying to re-create the short alias command that you teach on the managing package with python course. I completed the section about env and I am having a bit of a hard time setting the whole env topic in this course and also outside this course. Anyway. Here is my situation: RP_Material/Python_Dependency_Course/test-project

.bash_profile
 alias ae='deactivate &> /dev/null; source .venv/bin/activate'
alias de='deactivate'
ae
zsh: command not found: ae

Would you be able to tell me why am I getting this message? Thanking you in advances

It looks like you’re using zsh as your shell whereas I’m using bash in my example. So if you configure the alias in .bash_profile it won’t work because that’s the configuration file used by the bash shell.

To get the ae alias to work in zsh you need to define it in your .zshrc file. The alias syntax should be the same. I don’t use zsh myself but according to this Stack Overflow answer the alias syntax should be the same.

Hope that helps you out :)

I also just noticed that there’s a typo in your activate alias. The important command is:

source ./venv/bin/activate

In your example above there’s no ./ before venv. That’ll also cause it to fail because it can’t find the activate script inside the virtual environment.

Also my ae/de aliases assume that your virtual environment is called venv and that it lives inside the project folder. So in order for this to work your virtual environment folder must use the same name. But of course you can adapt the alias if you’d like.

Hi Dan,

I am trying to create this shortcut on Windows 10 and I get his error message:

bash: ./venv/Scripts/activate: No such file or directory

Do you know if any changes need to be made for this to work on Windows?

Thanks!

wow.. this worked like charm! wooo!

Hi all, with Powershell (Win 10) you can use one/all of the following:

function ce { cmd /c python -m venv .venv }
function ae { cmd /c deactivate > $null 2>&1; .\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 }
Set-Alias -Name de -Value 'deactivate'

‘ce’ creates the virtual environment; ‘ae’ and ‘de’ activates and deactivates it, respectively. To persist the aliases, I followed a guide on how to create a Powershell profile; then pasted the aliases within. To create a Powershell profile, issue the following:

1. Test-Path $Profile (if the output is True, jump to 3)
2. New-Item –Path $Profile –Type File -Force
3. notepad $Profile

Ah nice, thanks for sharing your PowerShell code with us Umberto :)

Hi Dan,

Just for curiosity, when you are writing the code do you have the virtual enviroment activated, or do you only activate the virtual enviroment when you are running the scripts?

I usually have a terminal window open alongside my editor with the virtual environment activated the whole time so I can quickly run and re-run code as needed.

Typically the first thing I do when I set up my coding environment at the start of the day to begin working on a project I’ll:

1. open my terminal app (I like iTerm2 on macOS)
2. cd to the project folder
3. open my editor with subl . (Sublime Text) or code . (VS Code)
4. open Sublime Merge with smerge .
5. and then run my ae alias to activate the Python virtual environment.

And then I’m all set up and ready to go :)

Thanks umbertomorelli1988 for sharing that. If you’ve already created a folder called venv like in the example provided this script won’t work. It creates a new folder ‘.venv’. So if you remove the ‘.’ from the script he provided in line 1 and 3, then it will work as advertised.

What does the “&> /dev/null;” mean? I feel that it’s similar to the conditional syntax of “(condition) ? true : false” in other programming languages.

Bobby Tagget

It redirects all types of console output to /dev/null (basically it removes console output instead of showing it to user/logging it in the terminal)

If you are using Linux, you can copy this code to check it:

echo "Hello Bobby"
echo "Hello Bobby" &> /dev/null