Making virtualenv on windows with powershell a little cleaner
While I code on a mac at home, I can’t live without my giant dual screens and solid state drive at work so I’m on a windows 7 box. Most of the time it’s fine, does everything I need, and I’m happy. I became full of rage for the first time last week trying to properly get virtualenv to play nice with powershell. (If you code on windows and are in the terminal a lot, switch to powershell, its great and comes with windows 7. There is a download for Windows XP)
I’m not going to recap how to set up virtualenv for your project as there is a great walk through on that here. The issue on windows is around when you want to activate your project. Powershell has a restricted execution policy turned on by default. The manual way around this is to run powershell as an administrator, and run this:
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
Works, but that’s an extra click. You can also change this value permanently in the registry at the key listed below, but that didn’t seem to stick when opening powershell through launchy
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell
Enter my hacked up solution.
Create a shortcut for powershell with these parameters:
Target: %SystemRoot%\syswow64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Start In: %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%
Then, if your workspace and projects are set up relatively the same, you can create a powershell script (or a cmd script if not using powershell), named workon.ps1 that looks something like this:
$ENV:PYTHONPATH="" cd C:\Users\tbroder\workspace\$args\ .\myenv\Scripts\activate
I threw this in my C:\Python26\Scripts folder. It assumes your project lives in a workspace folder, that your project name is a single word, and that all of your virtualenvs are called myenv. Example of using it below:
Windows PowerShell Copyright (C) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. PS C:\Users\tbroder> workon gsb (myenv) PS C:\Users\tbroder\workspace\gsb>
