Pipenv

📅 09 Mar 2021

This will not be an exhaustive post. Not many of my posts are. But I wanted to shed some light on a nice little development that maybe a few people aren’t aware of.

I worked as a back-end developer during the summer of 2020. I can’t tell you how many types I had to use pip and virtualenv. I honestly was bewildered by the virtual environment when I first started and screwed more than a few things up.

Enter pipenv.

OK, I haven’t used this a ton. Just a few personal projects - none of which had crazy dependancies.

But let me tell you, pipenv is super easy to use. To install, just open a terminal and type the following:


  $ sudo -H pip install -U pipenv

Next, go ahead and make a project folder. Go ahead and do it - I dare you.


  mkdir myproject

Then, install your favorite packages:


  $ cd myproject
  $ pipenv install requests

And this is where the magic happens. Unless you were smart and read ahead, pipenv will now create a virtual environment, create a Pipfile, and create a Pipfile.lock.

You can then put together a simple .py file to test everything. But most importantly, how do you activate the virtualenv? For pipenv, the command is just:


  $ pipenv shell

Note though that deactivating is also different than if you have used pip and virtualenv together. To exit the virtual environment, just type “exit”.

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