venvy

A very opinionated virtualenv wrapper for an even simpler venv management.

⚠️ This project is a work in progress. Use at your own risk!

If you're a Python developer, you do have to use virtual environments quite often. And, while there are tools that abscract that from you, you still have to go through quite a process to create venvs and jump between them.

Luckily, there's venvy. With it, instead of this:

python -m virtualenv \
 --python ~/.pyenv/versions/3.11.1/bin/python3.11 \
 --download \
 .venv \
 && source ./.venv/bin/activate

you could just run this:

venvy 311

Install

NOTE: venvy has not been published to PyPI yet, so this will not work as of now

pipx (recommended)

Use pipx to install venvy:

pipx install venvy

Plain pip

You can also just use pip:

pip install --user venvy

Usage

To create a virtual environment with the current version of Python, just run:

   venvy

This will create the environment inside .venv/ based on the first Python executable found in your $PATH.

You can write anything after venvy as parameters. Be as precise or as vague as you like, venvy is smart enough to decipher it:

# create a Python 3.7 venv
venvy 37

# create a 3.9 venv in a folder named ".venv39"
venvy .venv39

# create a PyPy 3.9 venv in a folder named "envpp" with a PowerShell activator
venvy pp39 envpp ps1

# create a Python 3.6 venv, where the version is guessed from the folder name
venvy venv36

# Create a CPython 3.10.0 venv in a folder named ".env" with a bash activator
venvy cp3.10.0 .env bash

Basically, venvy needs three pieces of information that it will pass to virtualenv: the Python path, the list of activators, and the name of the venv folder.

Python

By default, venvy will not choose any Python, but will ask virtualenv to do it. By default, it's the one that it's running from, which in our case is the one you installed it to. That being said, if you run CPython 3.8.16, and you run venvy with no arguments, you'll get a 3.8.16 environment. You can read more about how virtualenv discovers Python in their documentation.

You can specify the version as precise as you want to, and venvy will do its best to find it. You can, for example, name the folder ".venv37", and venvy will understand that you want Python 3.7.

You can also specify different Python implementations. venvy can understand most of them, actually — CPython, PyPy, Jython, ... — but virtualenv supports only PyPy and CPython.

If you use pyenv, you can tell venvy to use one of its Python versions:

# this will use .pyenv/versions/3.6.XX/bin/python3.6
venvy pyenv 3.6

Activators

By default, venvy will detect the shell you're using and use the activators needed, You can also give venvy the name of the shell, and it will cleverly decide what activator works best:

# all these will use the bash activator, since it works with any
# POSIX-compliant shell
venvy ash
venvy bash
venvy dash
venvy ksh
venvy sh
venvy shell
venvy zsh

# all these will use the batch activator
venvy bat
venvy batch
venvy cmd

# all these will use PowerShell
venvy powershell
venvy ps1

❗️IMPORTANT: If you run venvy python, it will NOT create the Python activators, but will think you mean the python executable. To create Python-based activators, run venvy python python.

Destination

By default, venvy will choose .venv as the name for the venv folder. You can provide any string, and if venvy doesn't think it's a Python version or an activator, it will use it as the folder name:

# will create venv inside ./myvenv/
venvy myvenv

If you specify a string that isn't a Python distribution, but contains a part of it (like a version number or the implementation), venvy could use it to derive the Python version:

# will create a folder named .venv37 with Python 3.7
venvy .venv37

# will create a folder named pp310venv with PyPy 3.10
venvy pp310venv

Licence

© 2022 Nikita Karamov
Licensed under the ISC License.

This project is hosted on Codeberg: https://github.com/kytta/venvy.git