why can't upstart run 'source bin/activate'?

python virtualenv upstart

Calum · Feb 12, 2013 · Viewed 8.5k times · Source

upstart won't activate my virtualenv for some reason.

This is how I run it

script
    # My startup script, plain old shell scripting here.
    cd path/to/env
    source bin/activate
    ....
end script

the virtualenv runs fine when started manually

Why does this not work?

Answer

So I've worked it out, for some reason upstart doesn't like using 'source' so I changed the line from:

source bin/activate

. bin/activate

and that works, don't know why though, so would be interested if someone could explain this