[kroger]

I use Make because it's fast, simple, always available, and bash has autocompletion for it, so I can type "make t<TAB>" to run my tests, for instance (or "make <TAB>" so see what commands I have available). I use make in my python projects for things like running tests, coverage, building the documentation (sphinx) and removing .pyc files.

For deployment I use fabric, but I have Make targets for the most used commands (again, it's nice to have completion). For example, these are two targets to deploy to my server and to my test machine:

    server-deploy:
            fab -f deployment/fabfile.py prod deploy

    test-deploy:
            fab -f deployment/fabfile.py test deploy

I use either pytest or nosetests to run my tests, mainly to have better and colored output.

I don't think you can use virtualenv(wrapper) without bash, but you can use use it with M-x ansi-term. But I got tired of trying to config emacs to run Python the way I wanted and now I edit my code an emacs and run the code in IPython in the terminal. Ipython's autoreload [0] is a huge help.

[0] http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/dev/config/extensions/autorel...

[mapleoin]

Why do you remove .pyc files?

[Pewpewarrows]

When doing a large refactoring or removing modules all-together, leftover .pyc or .pyo files can cause some very hard-to-identify import errors.

[kenneth_reitz]

    export PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1

:)