Python Virtual Environment Tools

This document provides some fundamental and comparisons about virtual environment tools. The readers are expected to use one of similar tools once. If not, the readers should read 12. Virtual Environments and Packages — Python 3.12.2 documentation. Some concepts might be oversimplified.

The fundamental

Every beginner tutorial about creating virtual environment starts with venv or virtualenv .

venv is a standard module for creating lightweight environment.

virtualenv is a tool to create isolated environments. Since Python 3.3, a subset of it has been integrated into the standard library under the venv module.

Eventually, the developers build management tools.

virtualenvwrapper is a useful set of scripts for creating and deleting virtual environments.

pyenv is a tool to install, isolate, manage, Python versions per user and per project.

pyenv-virtualenv is a plugin of pyenv to manage virtualenv .

pipenv is a Python virtualenv management tool that supports a multitude of systems and nicely bridges the gaps between pip, python (using system python, pyenv or asdf) and virtualenv.

The combinations

Black: virtual environment creation tools

Red: virtual environment management tools

Green: Python versions management tools

Here are some of the tool sets that people commonly use.

The comparisons

	virtualenvwrapper	pipenv pyenv	pyenv pyenv-virtualenv
Manage multiple Python versions	No	Yes	Yes
Manage per project	No, you can have many venv per project and many projects per venv	Yes	No, like virtualenvwrapper.

The holdup

The readers may ask what conda / mamaba and poetry are all about.

Conda-related

conda is a system-level, binary package and environment manager running on all major operating systems and platforms.

mamba is conda implemented in c++.

Many people might be more familiar with miniconda , micromamba which are minimal CLI versions of aforementioned tools.

Conda is similar to pyenv pyenv-virtualenv but not limited to Python. One can install C++ packages such as Nvidia drivers.

Important use case: people often use this for machine learning projects.

Poetry

poetry is a tool for dependency management and packaging in Python. It allows you to declare the libraries your project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them for you. Poetry offers a lockfile to ensure repeatable installs, and can build your project for distribution. Poetry either uses your configured virtualenvs or creates its own to always be isolated from your system.