Renaming a Virtualenv Folder Without Breaking It

Renaming a virtualenv folder without breaking it

You need to adjust your install to use relative paths. virtualenv provides for this with the --relocatable option. From the docs:

Normally environments are tied to a
specific path. That means that you
cannot move an environment around or
copy it to another computer. You can
fix up an environment to make it
relocatable with the command:

$ virtualenv --relocatable ENV

NOTE: ENV is the name of the virtual environment and you must run this from outside the ENV directory.

This will make some of the files
created by setuptools or distribute
use relative paths, and will change
all the scripts to use
activate_this.py instead of using the
location of the Python interpreter to
select the environment.

Note: you must run this after you've
installed any packages into the
environment. If you make an
environment relocatable, then install
a new package, you must run virtualenv
--relocatable again.

Can I move a virtualenv?

BUT ALAS:

No, you can't simply mv. There are workarounds, but it might be easier to reinstall.

(my-python-venv)$ /home/me/PeskyPartyPEnvs/pip3 install foaas
zsh: /home/me/PeskyPartyPEnvs/pip3: bad interpreter: /home/me/Env/my-python-venv/bin/python3: no such file or directory
(my-python-venv)$ deactivate
$ 

... presses enter a lot in frustration, and the following works

$
$
$ pip3 search foaas

Except it is not from my-python-venv, ergo sadness.

Want to mv your virtualenv and use it, otherwise unmodified?

Short Answer:

Well, ya can't.

Renaming a virtualenv folder without breaking it

You need to adjust your install to use relative paths. virtualenv provides for this with the --relocatable option. From the docs:

Normally environments are tied to a
specific path. That means that you
cannot move an environment around or
copy it to another computer. You can
fix up an environment to make it
relocatable with the command:

$ virtualenv --relocatable ENV

NOTE: ENV is the name of the virtual environment and you must run this from outside the ENV directory.

This will make some of the files
created by setuptools or distribute
use relative paths, and will change
all the scripts to use
activate_this.py instead of using the
location of the Python interpreter to
select the environment.

Note: you must run this after you've
installed any packages into the
environment. If you make an
environment relocatable, then install
a new package, you must run virtualenv
--relocatable again.

How can I rename a conda environment?

New answer:

From Conda 4.14 you will be able to use just:

conda rename -n old_name -d new_name 

Although, under the hood, conda rename still uses [1][2] undermentioned combination of conda create and conda remove.

Note that the -d flag is optional. It's for the positional argument, "destination". This should also work:

conda rename -n old_name new_name 

---

Old answer:

You can't.

One workaround is to create clone a new environment and then remove the original one.

First, remember to deactivate your current environment. You can do this with the commands:

• deactivate on Windows or
• source deactivate on macOS/Linux.

Then:

conda create --name new_name --clone old_name
conda remove --name old_name --all # or its alias: `conda env remove --name old_name`

Notice there are several drawbacks of this method:

1. It redownloads packages (you can use --offline flag to disable it)
2. Time consumed on copying environment's files
3. Temporary double disk usage

There is an open issue requesting this feature.

Poetry: How to keep using the old virtual environment when changing the name of the project root folder?

One option is to enable the virtualenvs.in-project option, e.g. by running

poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true

If set to true, the virtualenv wil [sic] be created and expected in a folder named .venv within the root directory of the project.

This will cause Poetry to create new environments in $project_root/.venv/. If you rename the project directory the environment should continue to work.

Renaming a virtualenv folder without breaking it

You need to adjust your install to use relative paths. virtualenv provides for this with the --relocatable option. From the docs:

Normally environments are tied to a
specific path. That means that you
cannot move an environment around or
copy it to another computer. You can
fix up an environment to make it
relocatable with the command:

$ virtualenv --relocatable ENV

NOTE: ENV is the name of the virtual environment and you must run this from outside the ENV directory.

This will make some of the files
created by setuptools or distribute
use relative paths, and will change
all the scripts to use
activate_this.py instead of using the
location of the Python interpreter to
select the environment.

Note: you must run this after you've
installed any packages into the
environment. If you make an
environment relocatable, then install
a new package, you must run virtualenv
--relocatable again.

---

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