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by zahlman 210 days ago
If you're okay with running the script only from the parent directory of the venv (I guess you have things set up so that's the project root), fine.

You never have to "worry about whether the environment was activated", unless your code depends on those environment variables (in which case your shebang trick won't help you). Just specify the path to the venv's Python executable.

You aren't really intended to put your own scripts in the venv's bin/ directly, although of course you can. An installer will create them for you, from the entry points defined in pyproject.toml. (This is one of the few useful things that an "editable install" can accomplish; I'm generally fairly negative on that model, however.)

If you have something installed in a venv and want to run it regardless of CWD, you can symlink the wrapper script from somewhere on your PATH. (That's what Pipx does.)
1 comments
mbreese 210 days ago
I use venv's to keep library installs out of the global space. My python scripts won't run without those libraries, so running from the project root is pretty much required. I don't use the variables set by activating the venv, so that's not a real concern.

I've done this for years to keep my individual projects separate and not changing activations when switching directories. I also make sure to only call `venv/bin/pip` or `venv/bin/python3` when I'm directly calling pip or python. So, yes -- you have to be in the root project directory for this to work, but for me, that's a useful tradeoff. Even when running code from within a docker container, I still use this method, so I make sure that I'm executing from the proper work directory.

If I think that I need to run a program (without arguments), I'll have a short shell wrapper that is essentially:

    #!/bin/bash
    cd $(dirname $0)
    venv/bin/python3 myscript.py
As far as running a program that's managed by venv/pip, symlinks are essentially what I do. I'll create a new venv for each program, install it in that venv, and then symlink from venv/bin/program to $HOME/.local/bin/. It works very well when you're installing a pip managed program.
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hebelehubele 210 days ago
I also use the trick to insert new lookup paths.

  project_root = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
  sys.path.insert(0, project_root)
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