Issue
I am using many python packages like numpy, bottleneck, h5py, ... for my daily work on my computer. Since I am root on this machine it is no problem to install these packages. However I would like to use my "environment" of different packages also on a server machine where I only have a normal user account. So I thought about creating a virtual environment (with virtualenv) on my machine by installing all needed packages in there. Then I just copy the whole folder to the server and can run everything from it?
My machine uses Fedora 19 whereas the server uses Ubuntu. Is this a problem? I could not find any information on how to move such a virtual environment to another system. The reason I would like to create the virtual environment on my machine first is that there are a lot of tools missing on the server like python-dev, so I can't compile numpy for instance.
I looked into Anaconda and Enthought Python distributions, but they don't include a couple of packages I need. Also, there should be a completely "open" way for this problem?
Moving the virtual environment to the server failed, since it is complaining about some missing files when I import the packages. This is not surprising probably...
Solution
You shouldn't move your virtualenv since it is essentially linked to your system python and the binary won't work on other machines.
However... you can export a list of installed packages and install them in another virtualenv through a requirements.txt file.
Basically, what I usually do with most of my projects:
# Generate a requirements file:
pip freeze > requirements.txt
On the new machine:
# This uses virtualenvwrapper, but you can do it without as well
mkproject my_project_name
git clone git://..../ .
pip install -r requirements.txt
Answered By - Wolph Answer Checked By - David Marino (WPSolving Volunteer)