[zedr]

Using a local virtual environment and then building a Docker image removes most of the headaches. I also bundle a Makefile with simple targets. See this as an example: https://github.com/zedr/cffi_test/blob/master/Makefile New projects are created from a template using Cookiecutter.

It isn't really so bad in 2018, but I do have a lot of scars from the old days, most of them caused by zc.buildout.

The secret is using, as the article mentions, a custom virtual env for each instance of the project. I never found the need for stateful tooling like Virtualenvwrapper.

[jbergknoff]

You can also set a PYTHONUSERBASE environment variable (and `pip install --user`) to scope the installed packages to the project's directory. This is effectively the same as a virtualenv, but doesn't have the requirement on bash or "activation", and it's less magical than virtualenv because these choices are explicit on each command. The tradeoff is that it can be tedious to be explicit, remembering to use `--user` and specify the PYTHONUSERBASE. If you're scripting everything via make, though, then that's not such a burden.

[gvalkov]

There is no need to activate a virtualenv to use it. Just call $VIRTUALENV/bin/python directly. Activating is just a convenience for doing interactive work.

[zedr]

Thanks! I didn't know about that. I'll try it out.