Python 3.3 includes in its standard library the new package venv
. What does it do, and how does it differ from all the other packages that seem to match the regex (py)?(v|virtual|pip)?env
?
virtualenv
is a very popular tool that creates isolated Python environments for Python libraries. If you're not familiar with this tool, I highly recommend learning it, as it is a very useful tool, and I'll be making comparisons to it for the rest of this answer.
It works by installing a bunch of files in a directory (eg: env/
), and then modifying the PATH
environment variable to prefix it with a custom bin
directory (eg: env/bin/
). An exact copy of the python
or python3
binary is placed in this directory, but Python is programmed to look for libraries relative to its path first, in the environment directory. It's not part of Python's standard library, but is officially blessed by the PyPA (Python Packaging Authority). Once activated, you can install packages in the virtual environment using pip
.
pyenv
is used to isolate Python versions. For example, you may want to test your code against Python 2.7, 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8, so you'll need a way to switch between them. Once activated, it prefixes the PATH
environment variable with ~/.pyenv/shims
, where there are special files matching the Python commands (python
, pip
). These are not copies of the Python-shipped commands; they are special scripts that decide on the fly which version of Python to run based on the PYENV_VERSION
environment variable, or the .python-version
file, or the ~/.pyenv/version
file. pyenv
also makes the process of downloading and installing multiple Python versions easier, using the command pyenv install
.
pyenv-virtualenv
is a plugin for pyenv
by the same author as pyenv
, to allow you to use pyenv
and virtualenv
at the same time conveniently. However, if you're using Python 3.3 or later, pyenv-virtualenv
will try to run python -m venv
if it is available, instead of virtualenv
. You can use virtualenv
and pyenv
together without pyenv-virtualenv
, if you don't want the convenience features.
virtualenvwrapper
is a set of extensions to virtualenv
(see docs). It gives you commands like mkvirtualenv
, lssitepackages
, and especially workon
for switching between different virtualenv
directories. This tool is especially useful if you want multiple virtualenv
directories.
pyenv-virtualenvwrapper
is a plugin for pyenv
by the same author as pyenv
, to conveniently integrate virtualenvwrapper
into pyenv
.
pipenv
aims to combine Pipfile
, pip
and virtualenv
into one command on the command-line. The virtualenv
directory typically gets placed in ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/XXX
, with XXX
being a hash of the path of the project directory. This is different from virtualenv
, where the directory is typically in the current working directory. pipenv
is meant to be used when developing Python applications (as opposed to libraries). There are alternatives to pipenv
, such as poetry
, which I won't list here since this question is only about the packages that are similarly named.
pyvenv
is a script shipped with Python 3 but deprecated in Python 3.6 as it had problems (not to mention the confusing name). In Python 3.6+, the exact equivalent is python3 -m venv
.
venv
is a package shipped with Python 3, which you can run using python3 -m venv
(although for some reason some distros separate it out into a separate distro package, such as python3-venv
on Ubuntu/Debian). It serves the same purpose as virtualenv
, but only has a subset of its features (see a comparison here). virtualenv
continues to be more popular than venv
, especially since the former supports both Python 2 and 3.
This is my personal recommendation for beginners: start by learning virtualenv
and pip
, tools which work with both Python 2 and 3 and in a variety of situations, and pick up other tools once you start needing them.