Renaming a virtualenv folder without breaking it

Question

I've created folder and initialized a virtualenv instance in it.

$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ virtualenv env

When I run (env)$ pip freeze, it shows the installed packages as it should.

Now I want to rename myproject/ to project/.

$ mv myproject/ project/

However, now when I run

$ . env/bin/activate
(env)$ pip freeze

it says pip is not installed. How do I rename the project folder without breaking the environment?

Answer 1

You need to adjust your install to use relative paths. virtualenv provides for this with the --relocatable option. From the docs:

Normally environments are tied to a specific path. That means that you cannot move an environment around or copy it to another computer. You can fix up an environment to make it relocatable with the command:

$ virtualenv --relocatable ENV

NOTE: ENV is the name of the virtual environment and you must run this from outside the ENV directory.

This will make some of the files created by setuptools or distribute use relative paths, and will change all the scripts to use activate_this.py instead of using the location of the Python interpreter to select the environment.

Note: you must run this after you've installed any packages into the environment. If you make an environment relocatable, then install a new package, you must run virtualenv --relocatable again.