Installing Django and modules in virtual environment

0
votes

My question is do i have to install django every single time in my virtual environment in order to run my python files? and is this taking up bunch of space on my machine? My project also uses "matplotlib" and every virtual environment i create it also asks me to import the matplotlib module too. its getting annoying. do i have to do this every time?

Im new to Django. I wanted to run some python files in django but they weren't working, so after some research i found out i needed to run my pycharm project in a virtual environment in order to run these python files.

my folders look like this pycharmProjects -> my project I enter pycharmProjects and I set up virtual environment using "pienv shell". Then i run "python3 manage.py runserver". It turns out i must install django in the virtual environment before the files run.

2
pythondjango
You don't "have to" use a virtual environment. You can choose to install and run everything globally if you prefer. But by the time you've done a few projects you'll soon learn what "dependency hell" means :) So yes, in seriousness - you do "have to" do this. It will take up a little bit of space but it's negligible compared to modern hard drives. - Robin Zigmond
if you don't want your requirements clash within different projects then you should keep each project with its own virtualenv ( that is its primary use case). normally you would list requirements in requirements.txt and install them from it. Also you could check pipenv - iklinac

2 Answers

2
votes

Short answer is no, you don't have to use a virtual environment at all and can install your dependancies globally instead. However you will soon find that it will cause a lot of issues. The main reason you would create a virtual environment is to give control of your dependancies and prevent bugs that could be caused because of them having their wires crossed between projects.

1
votes

Short answer yes.

If you create a virualenv you have to install all packages, that your program needs.

Long answer:

You could install django system wide and then create a virtualenv with the option --system-site-packages then django would be used from your globally installed python. (Or you install everything just in your global python, put I personally don't think this is good practice)

If you work with many different projects I think you will avoid a lot of trouble if you use one virtualenv per project. Trouble meaning that one project breaks, because one pip install for another project changed the version of one package and one project can't handle the newer version.

I would recommend to create a requirements.txt file for each project, that lists the dependencies then you can create the virtualenv with following command pip install -r requirements.txt

if you have requirement.txt files, then you can create virtualenvs rather quickly if going back to an old project and you can delete the virtualenvs whenever you run out of disk space. If you want to be an the safe side, type pip freeze > pipfreeze.txt prior to deleting the virtualenv and use pip install -r pipfreeze.txt if you want to create one with the same modules and the same versions.

You also might want to look at direnv or autoenv if working on a linux like system. This will automatically switch to the required virtualenv when changing to a project's working directory.