[Too]

npm is equivalent to combining pip and virtualenv into a single tool. This gives better ergonomics when switching between projects since you never have to "activate" your environment, it's always activated when standing in the project directory.

[Pandabob]

Isn't this what Pipenv does? What has been a downer for me is that many of the cloud providers do not support pipfiles in their serverless app services (Elastic Beanstalk, App Engine etc.)

[Pandabob]

On second thought, at least on GCP I should be able to put the pipfiles into .gcloudignore and just update the requirements.txt file with each new commit using git hooks, build scripts or a ci/cd tool.

[EdwardDiego]

Yep, correct. Unfortunately I had quite a few issues with pipenv - mainly around its relationship with pip.

[maksimum]

That does sound convenient. I wonder if the virtualenv aspect is relevant though, i.e. do people really deploy npm apps outside of a container/isolation layer?

I imagine if you're deploying docker, you probably should be developing in docker (e.g. using PyCharm's remote interpreter/docker interpreter integration).