virtualenv --no-site-packages and pip still finding global packages?

python virtualenv pip
ianw picture ianw · Sep 5, 2009 · Viewed 89.9k times · Source

I was under the impression that virtualenv --no-site-packages would create a completely separate and isolated Python environment, but it doesn't seem to.

For example, I have python-django installed globally, but wish to create a virtualenv with a different Django version.

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages foo       
New python executable in foo/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
$ pip -E foo install Django
Requirement already satisfied: Django in /usr/share/pyshared
Installing collected packages: Django
Successfully installed Django

From what I can tell, the pip -E foo install above is supposed to re-install a new version of Django. Also, if I tell pip to freeze the environment, I get a whole lot of packages. I would expect that for a fresh environment with --no-site-packages this would be blank?

$ pip -E foo freeze
4Suite-XML==1.0.2
BeautifulSoup==3.1.0.1
Brlapi==0.5.3
BzrTools==1.17.0
Django==1.1
... and so on ...

Am I misunderstanding how --no-site-packages is supposed to work?

Answer

wobbily_col picture wobbily_col · Apr 8, 2013

I had a problem like this, until I realized that (long before I had discovered virtualenv), I had gone adding directories to the PYTHONPATH in my .bashrc file. As it had been over a year beforehand, I didn't think of that straight away.

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