[Distutils] repeatable and updatable virtualenv

[Brad Allen]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 2:26 AM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> How can I set up a virtualenv in such a way that I can version control the
> packages and their versions that are installed in it?
>
> The answer would appear to a custom bootstrap script, but how would I think
> update an existing virtualenv when I added or removed packages or changed
> the version of a specific package?


You could try envbuilder; I find it very helpful for setting up
development environments repeatably when developing several related
packages ('er, 'module distributions') simultaneously.

It basically just creates a virtualenv, checks out/clones whatever you
specify in the .env confiig file, and runs setup.py develop on each of
the checked out packages into the virtualenv. Also, it provides a way
to apply commands across all the checked out packages (like 'update'
or 'status')

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/envbuilder/0.1.4

I think a similar functionality can be had using buildout with
mr.developer, but I have not tried it yet. However as far as I know,
buildout does not create a virtualenv (yet).