Is it possible to activate virtualenv in Google-colab? (/bin/sh: 1: source: not found)

Question

I am trying to install theano in Google Colab for testing. I have installed virtualenv and created an environment:

!pip3 install virtualenv
!virtualenv theanoEnv

But am not able to activate the virtual environment even explicitly mentioned the location of 'activate' command.

!source /content/theanoEnv/bin/activate theanoEnv

Error Message is:

/bin/sh: 1: source: not found

Is it even possible to do?:

source /[SomeVirtualEnv]/bin/activate SomeVirtualEnv

Answer 1

Short answer, I don't believe it is possible, although you can always run

!pip3 install theano

I was able to activate the virtualenv, but I don't believe you can switch the current notebook to use the newly created virtualenv.

!pip3 install virtualenv
!virtualenv theanoEnv
!echo '#!/bin/bash \n . ./theanoEnv/bin/activate theanoEnv \n which python3'  > source_theanoEnv.sh && chmod +x source_theanoEnv.sh && ./source_theanoEnv.sh && which python3
!which python3

I have put "which python3" in 3 places and the results are

/content/theanoEnv/bin/python3
/usr/bin/python3
/usr/bin/python3

So it looks like the "activate" is only temporary and Colaboratory/Jupyter are using /usr/bin/python3 still

Basically each ! command runs in its own shell, and Colaboratory does not know the environment changed

I was hoping I could follow these steps https://help.pythonanywhere.com/pages/IPythonNotebookVirtualenvs/

/content/theanoEnv/bin/pip3 install ipykernel
/content/theanoEnv/bin/python3 -m ipykernel install --user --name=theanoEnv

But I don't know what to set the kernel_class to

%config IPKernelApp.kernel_class='???'

Also, even if the above worked, I don't believe there is a way to restart the notebook to use the new kernel.

Perhaps someone more versed in Jupyter/Colaboratory could explain if this would be possible.