Virtualenv created a folder, but the result its not I wanted

Question

I created a folder via virtualenv command, but the result isn't what I wanted.

[root@localhost opt]# virtualenv my_env
New python executable in /opt/my_env/bin/**python2.6**
Also creating executable in /opt/my_env/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.

My system is CentOS 6.5. Before I created my folder I upgraded my python 2.6 to python 3.6. Then I wanted to create an isolated environment to practice Django. Unfortunately, the folder has python 2.6, it should be python 3.6. Can someone tell me what happened?

Please format the error by adding 4 leading space to the error. — , Oct 13 '17 at 14:26

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 13 '17 at 14:31

I upgraded my python 2.6 to python 3.6

In the Python universe, Python 2 and Python 3 are two different things. So what you actually did was to install Python 3 alongside Python 2. Now your system has both Python 2 (which can be run by the command python) and also Python 3 (which can be run by the command python3)

So when you ran virtualenv my_env it fired the default Python interpreter which is Python 2 in CentOS 6.x. That's the reason for Python 2.6 in your virtual environment.

Setting up Virtual Environment with Python 3

To get a Python 3 interpreter in your virtual environment run:

virtualenv -p python3 my_env

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 28 '20 at 02:39

1

You could go with python3 -m venv env No need for virtualenv

What you did

virtualenv my_env

is invoking the python2 virtualenv command to prepare a python2 environment.

Besides, you should have a look at Pipenv

edited Feb 28 '20 at 02:39

Dodge

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answered Oct 13 '17 at 14:44

Thomas Junk

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I am a new guys in programming! Thank you for you help, I appreciated you. – Walle Luo Oct 14 '17 at 05:27

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 13 '17 at 14:30

0

Did you try using -p option? as in:

$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.5 venv

answered Oct 13 '17 at 14:30

I've tried, it works. Thank you guys! – Walle Luo Oct 14 '17 at 05:21

Luís Fernando · Answer 4 · 2017-10-13T15:40:10.257

Since you are on linux and many programs will start to use python3 as default, you can create an alias for python2 and 3 in order to virtually switch the default python to python3 in your system. To do that, just add these lines to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_aliases file:

alias python='/usr/bin/python3'
alias python2='/usr/bin/python'

This will make it easy to work with the latest Django version while not breaking any current python program from running. And it's easy to undo. Scripts can start with #!/usr/bin/python3 or #!/usr/bin/python to respectively use python3 or python2 directly.

Virtualenv created a folder, but the result its not I wanted

4 Answers4