A Virtual Environment is a Python environment, that is an isolated working copy of Python that allows you to work on a specific project without affecting other projects So basically it is a tool that enables multiple side-by-side installations of Python, one for each project.
Creating a Python virtual environment in Linux
If pip is not in your system
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
Then install virtualenv
$ pip install virtualenv
Now check your installation
$ virtualenv --version
Create a virtual environment now,
$ virtualenv virtualenv_name
After this command, a folder named
virtualenv_name
will be created. You can name anything to it. If you want to create a virtualenv for specific python version, type
$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 virtualenv_name
or
$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 virtualenv_name
Now at last we just need to activate it, using command
$ source virtualenv_name/bin/activate
Now you are in a Python virtual environment You can deactivate using
$ deactivate
Creating Python virtualenv in Windows
If python is installed in your system, then pip comes in handy. So simple steps are: 1) Install virtualenv using
> pip install virtualenv
2)Now in which ever directory you are, this line below will create a virtualenv there
> python -m venv myenv
And here also you can name it anything. 3) Now if you are same directory then type,
> myenv\Scripts\activate
You can explicitly specify your path too. Similarly like Linux you can deactivate it like
$ deactivate
