How to List All Python Virtual Environments in Linux

List all virtualenv

Silly question. Found that there's a

lsvirtualenv

command which lists all existing virtualenv.

How to list all python virtual environments in Linux?

If only using the lowly virtualenv ...{directory} to create a virtualenv, then there is just some directory somewhere that has that specific environment in it. You can only "list" these by running find on your $HOME directory (or any other list of directories you might have used to create virtualenvs) looking for python installations. Hopefully some convention was followed like storing them all in ~/virtualenvs. (See also Where should virtualenvs be created? )

If using virtualenvwrapper, then as mentioned, use the command lsvirtualenv to list envs that were created with mkvirtualenv. They are all in ~/.virtualenvs by default. See https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/command_ref.html

If using conda, you can list virtual envs created via conda create --name {my_env} [...], using either conda info --envs or conda env list. See https://conda.io/docs/using/envs.html#list-all-environments

How can I list all the virtual environments created with venv?

On Linux/macOS this should get most of it

find ~ -d -name "site-packages" 2>/dev/null

Looking for directories under your home that are named "site-packages" which is where venv puts its pip-installed stuff. the /dev/null bit cuts down on the chattiness of things you don't have permission to look into.

Or you can look at the specifics of a particular expected file. For example, activate has nondestructive as content. Then you need to look for a pattern than matches venv but not anaconda and the rest.

find ~ -type f -name "activate" -exec egrep -l nondestructive /dev/null {} \; 2>/dev/null

macos mdfind

On macos, this is is pretty fast, using mdfind (locate on Linux would probably have similar performance.

mdfind -name activate | egrep /bin/activate$|  xargs -o egrep -l nondestructive 2>/dev/null | xargs -L 1 dirname | xargs -L 1 dirname

So we :

• look for all activate files
• egrep to match only bin/activate files (mdfind matches on things like .../bin/ec2-activate-license)
• look for that nondestructive and print filename where there is a match.
• the 2 xargs -L 1 dirname allow us to "climb up" from /bin/activate to the virtual env's root.

Helper function with -v flag to show details.

jvenvfindall(){  # search for Python virtual envs.  -v for verbose details

    unset verbose
    
    OPTIND=1
    while getopts 'v' OPTION; do
      case "$OPTION" in
    
        v)
          verbose=1
          ;;
    
        ?)
          ;;
      esac
    done
    shift "$(($OPTIND -1))"
    
    
    local bup=$PWD
    for dn in $(mdfind -name activate | egrep /bin/activate$|  xargs -o egrep -l nondestructive 2>/dev/null | xargs -L 1 dirname | xargs -L 1 dirname) 
    do

        if [[ -z "$verbose" ]]; then
            printf "$dn\n"
        else
            printf "\n\nvenv info for $dn:\n"
            cd $dn
            echo space usage, $(du -d 0 -h)
            #requires the jq and jc utilities... to extract create and modification times
            echo create, mod dttm: $(stat . | jc --stat | jq '.[]|{birth_time, change_time}')
            tree -d -L 1 lib

        fi
    done

    cd $bup
}

output:

...

venv info for /Users/me/kds2/issues2/067.pip-stripper/010.fixed.p1.check_venv/venvtest:
space usage, 12M .
create, mod dttm: { "birth_time": "Apr 16 13:04:43 2019", "change_time": "Sep 30 00:00:39 2019" }
lib
└── python3.6

...

Hmmm, disk usage is not that bad, but something similar for node_modules might save some real space.

Is there a way to list all python virtual environments created using the venv module?

No, not in an easy way.

Python virtual environments can be stored anywhere on the disk. And AFAIK they are not indexed, they are truely isolated (after all you can just remove venv directory and be done with it, you don't need to do anything special). So that would require entire disk scan. Which potentially can be done (you can search for all Python executables for example) but is rather painful.

It works with Conda because Conda places venvs in concrete path, e.g. /home/username/miniconda/envs/.

How can I make a list of installed packages in a certain virtualenv?

Calling pip command inside a virtualenv should list the packages visible/available in the isolated environment. Make sure to use a recent version of virtualenv that uses option --no-site-packages by default. This way the purpose of using virtualenv is to create a python environment without access to packages installed in system python.

Next, make sure you use pip command provided inside the virtualenv (YOUR_ENV/bin/pip). Or just activate the virtualenv (source YOUR_ENV/bin/activate) as a convenient way to call the proper commands for python interpreter or pip

~/Projects$ virtualenv --version
1.9.1

~/Projects$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 demoenv2.7
Running virtualenv with interpreter /usr/bin/python2.7
New python executable in demoenv2.7/bin/python2.7
Also creating executable in demoenv2.7/bin/python
Installing setuptools............................done.
Installing pip...............done.

~/Projects$ cd demoenv2.7/
~/Projects/demoenv2.7$ bin/pip freeze
wsgiref==0.1.2

~/Projects/demoenv2.7$ bin/pip install commandlineapp
Downloading/unpacking commandlineapp
Downloading CommandLineApp-3.0.7.tar.gz (142kB): 142kB downloaded
Running setup.py egg_info for package commandlineapp
Installing collected packages: commandlineapp
Running setup.py install for commandlineapp
Successfully installed commandlineapp
Cleaning up...

~/Projects/demoenv2.7$ bin/pip freeze
CommandLineApp==3.0.7
wsgiref==0.1.2

What's strange in my answer is that package 'wsgiref' is visible inside the virtualenv. Its from my system python. Currently I do not know why, but maybe it is different on your system.

how can I find out which python virtual environment I am using?

You can use sys.prefix to determine which virtualenv you're in.

import sys
print(sys.prefix)

from the sys docs

A string giving the site-specific directory prefix where the platform independent Python files are installed

Python: How do you check what is in virtualenv?

Once you activate your virtual environment, you should be able to list out packages using pip list and verify version using python --version.

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