How to export virtualenv?

You can install virtualenvwrapper and try cpvirtualenv, but the developers advise caution here:

Warning

Copying virtual environments is not well supported. Each virtualenv has path information hard-coded into it, and there may be cases where the copy code does not know it needs to update a particular file. Use with caution.


You don't copy paste your virtualenv. You export the list of all the packages installed like -

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Then push the requirements.txt file to anywhere you want to deploy the code, and then just do what you did on dev machine -

$ virtualenv <env_name>
$ source <env_name>/bin/activate
(<env_name>)$ pip install -r path/to/requirements.txt

And there you have all your packages installed with the exact version.

You can also look into Fabric to automate this task, with a function like this -

def pip_install():
    with cd(env.path):
        with prefix('source venv/bin/activate'):
            run('pip install -r requirements.txt')