I'm following a tutorial called Starting a Django 1.4 Project the Right Way, which gives directions on how to use virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper, among other things.
There's a section that reads:
If you're using pip to install packages (and I can't see why you wouldn't), you can get both virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper by simply installing the latter.
$ pip install virtualenvwrapper
After it's installed, add the following lines to your shell's start-up file (.zshrc, .bashrc, .profile, etc).
export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/directory-you-do-development-in
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
Reload your start up file (e.g. source .zshrc) and you're ready to go.
I am running Mac OSX, and don't know my way around the Terminal too well. What exactly does the author mean by shell's start-up file (.zshrc, .bashrc, .profile, etc)
? Where do I find this file, so that I can add those three lines?
Also, what does he mean by reload your start up file (e.g. source .zshrc)
?
I would appreciate a detailed response, specific to OSX.
You're probably using bash
so just add these 3 lines to ~/.bash_profile
:
$ cat >> ~/.bash_profile
export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/directory-you-do-development-in
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
^D
where ^D
means you type Control+D (EOF).
Then either close your terminal window and open a new one, or you can "reload" your .bash_profile
like this:
$ source ~/.bash_profile
If you use bash, it usually means ~/.bash_profile
.
In Terminal and iTerm new shells are login shells by default, so ~/.bashrc
is not read at all. If instructions written for some other platform tell you to add something to .bashrc
, you often have to add it to .bash_profile
instead.
If both ~/.profile
and ~/.bash_profile
exist, only .bash_profile
is read. .profile
is also read by other shells, but many of the things you'd add to .bash_profile
wouldn't work with them.
From /usr/share/doc/bash/bash.html:
When bash is invoked as an interactive login shell, or as a non-interactive shell with the --login option, it first reads and executes commands from the file /etc/profile
, if that file exists. After reading that file, it looks for ~/.bash_profile
, ~/.bash_login
, and ~/.profile
, in that order, and reads and executes commands from the first one that exists and is readable.
[...]
When an interactive shell that is not a login shell is started, bash reads and executes commands from ~/.bashrc
, if that file exists.
I have Anaconda install, so I add these 3 lines to ~/.bash_profile
export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/Documents/Python
source /Users/Username/anaconda3/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
and then reload profile by:
$ source ~/.bash_profile
I use an approach that I think is easy to maintain.
It also works well if you sometimes use Ubuntu systems, however I will be sure to address the OP's OSX requirement in my answer.
Create a .aliases
file with your alias(es) in your home directory, e.g. ~/.aliases
Execute this file from your .bashrc
file (this is executed each time for a new shell process) with source ~/.aliases
. This is all you would actually need to do for Ubuntu btw.
On OSX call .bashrc
from your ~/.profile
file, i.e. have ~/.bash_profile
contain: source ~/.bashrc