How to force virtualenv to install latest setuptoo

Question

Is it possible to force virtualenv to use the latest setuptools and pip available from pypi? Essentially, I'm looking for the opposite of the --never-download flag.

Currently, when I make a new virtualenv, it uses the local (old) versions that come bundled with virtualenv.

$ v.mk testvenv
New python executable in testvenv/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
Installing pip...............done.
$ pip show setuptools
---
Name: setuptools
Version: 0.6c11
Location: /Users/cwilson/.virtualenvs/testvenv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.7.egg
Requires: 
$ pip search setuptools
[...]
setuptools                - Easily download, build, install, upgrade, and
                            uninstall Python packages
INSTALLED: 0.6c11
LATEST:    0.7.2
[...]

Answer 1

It's not supported for security reasons.

Using virtualenv.py as an isolated script (i.e. without an associated virtualenv_support directory) is no longer supported for security reasons and will fail with an error. Along with this, --never-download is now always pinned to True, and is only being maintained in the short term for backward compatibility (Pull #412).

I can't use the --extra-search-dir option either because it's currently broken https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/327

Looks like the only option is to simply wait for the virtualenv maintainers to update the bundled packages?

Answer 2

I needed the latest setuptools library, and the --extra-search-dir flag wasn't working for me (even though it's been fixed apparently).

However, making a virtualenv without setuptools and then installing directly from PyPi worked great. E.g. to set up a virtualenv called test:

virtualenv --no-setuptools test
source test/bin/activate
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | python
easy_install pip

Testing with

python -c 'import setuptools; print setuptools.__version__'

shows the right version.

Answer 3

You can upgrade pip after installing your virtualenv by using pip install -U pip.

I'm sure you could write a bootstrap-script to automate this step.

Answer 4

I ran into the same problem, and I fixed it by upgrading setuptools.

If env is your virtual env, run the following:

$ env/bin/pip install --upgrade setuptools

Answer 5

Building on ematsen's excellent answer I made a bash script that works with virtualenvwrapper

#!/bin/bash
source `which virtualenvwrapper.sh`
mkvirtualenv --no-setuptools $1
wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | python
rm setuptools-*.zip
easy_install pip

# for python version < 2.7.9
# https://urllib3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced-usage.html#ssl-warnings
pip install urllib3[secure]