How to use it?

ave was created out of my personal needs of organizing projects and need to type less. There are two ways in which ave can be used. If you type ave with no arguments, it will start from current directory and search for virtual environment by cd ing upwards thru parent directories or by looking inside ~/$WORKON_HOME. When virtual environment is found, it is activated (sourced). Called with an argument, it will do the same and optionally cd to project directory if it’s held under source controled.

The above is all ave does, but it’s easier to understand with following example. Let’s assume we have this directory structure:

# this is where we store our projects
~/projects/
    common-env/
        project_1/
        project_2/
        project_3/
    project_a/
    project_b/
    project_c/

# this is where we store virtual environments
~/$WORKON_HOME/
    common-env/
    project_a/
    project_b/
    project_c/

# temp directory to work with throwaway stuff
~/tmp/

ave ~/projects/common-env/project_1

cd ~/projects/common-env/project_1
ave

ave ~/projects/project_a

cd ~/projects/project_a
ave

virtualenv ~/tmp/foo-playground
cd ~/tmp/foo-playground
ave

pip install foo
python
# import foo and play with it

# enough play, go to work
rm -rf ~/foo-playground

How to install it?

pip install ave --user

sudo pip install ave

# define directory to put virtual environments
export WORKON_HOME=~/.venvs

# source ave function
source /path/to/ave.sh

What about virtualenvwrapper?

By all means, virtualenvwrapper is mature and well tested software. It works great and is recommended by many pythonistas. It does so much more than ave and if you need its functionality, you should check it out.

ave uses the same WORKON_HOME evnironment variable so it’s compatible with virtualenvwrapper, both can be used at the same time.

ave is simple to the point that this documentation is longer than the complete ave code. I like simple.

Licence

ave is MIT licensed.