ave is small shell (bash, zsh) function to help out with activation of Python's virtual environments; the name stands for Activate Virtual Environment (which is almost all it does).
ave was created out of my personal needs of organizing projects and need to
type less. There are two ways in which ave can be used. If you type ave
with no arguments, it will start from current directory and search for virtual
environment by cd
ing upwards thru parent directories or by looking inside
~/$WORKON_HOME
. When virtual environment is found, it is activated
(sourced). Called with an argument, it will do the same and optionally cd
to project directory if it's held under source control (git, mercurial or svn).
The above is all ave
does, but it's easier to understand with following
example. Let's assume we have this directory structure:
# this is where we store our projects
~/projects/
common-env/
project_1/
project_2/
project_3/
project_a/
project_b/
project_c/
# this is where we store virtual environments
~/$WORKON_HOME/
common-env/
project_a/
project_b/
project_c/
# temp directory to work with throwaway stuff
~/tmp/
These are projects that are all based on the same virtual environment,
common-env
in the example:
ave ~/projects/common-env/project_1
or
cd ~/projects/common-env/project_1
ave
After any of those commands, common-env
is activated and current
directory is changed to project_1
.
Each project has its own virtual environment:
ave ~/projects/project_a
or
cd ~/projects/project_a
ave
With bash (or any other shell) and tab completion, very few keystrokes are needed.
There is often a need to test new libraries. You want to quickly make an environment, type out some code (directly in python shell or by creating a file), play with it and delete it.
virtualenv ~/tmp/foo-playground
cd ~/tmp/foo-playground
ave
pip install foo
python
# import foo and play with it
# enough play, go to work
rm -rf ~/foo-playground
This way you are not cluttering WORKON_HOME
directory even if you don't
delete temporary environmets right away after use (which I usually don't).
Install for user:
pip install ave --user
or if you want to install globally:
sudo pip install ave
Clone the repository and source ave.sh script from your .bashrc or .profile.
# define directory to put virtual environments
export WORKON_HOME=~/.venvs
# source ave function
source /path/to/ave.sh
By all means, virtualenvwrapper is mature and well tested software. It works great and is recommended by many pythonistas. It does so much more than ave and if you need its functionality, you should check it out.
ave uses the same WORKON_HOME
evnironment variable so it's compatible
with virtualenvwrapper, both can be used at the same time.
ave is simple to the point that this documentation is longer than the complete ave code. I like simple.
ave is MIT licensed.