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Showing posts from September, 2016

Python alias commands that play nice with virtualenv

There are plenty of predefined Python executables, symlinks, and aliases that come bundled with your operating system. These commands come in very handy because it saves you from typing out long commands or chain of scripts. However the downfall of operating system aliases is that they don’t always play nice with virtualenv (or venv if you’re on Python 3). Most predefined aliases use the system’s default Python as the interpreter, which is next to useless when your application runs in a virtual environment. Over the years, I’ve come up with my own Python aliases that play nice with virtual environments. For this post, I tried to stay as generic as possible such that any alias here can be used by every Pythonista. In other words, there will be no aliases for specific frameworks such as running a Django server or starting a Scrappy spider. The following is one of my bash scripts I source: .py-aliases #----- Pip -----# alias pip-list="pip freeze | less" alias pip-search