What is Python Virtual Environment
When you’re engaged in a Python project that incorporates third-party packages, it’s generally inadvisable to install these packages directly into the system-wide environment. There are two primary reasons for this caution:
- Firstly, it leads to the pollution of the global namespace. Your ability to test and debug your projects becomes significantly easier when they are executed within isolated and reproducible environments. In cases where two projects rely on conflicting versions of the same package, utilizing a single environment becomes unfeasible.
- Secondly, your distribution or operating system might have meticulously curated the system-wide environment. Installing or uninstalling packages independently of its package manager introduces a tangible risk of destabilizing your system.
Virtual environments were created to address these issues. They offer isolation both from the system-wide installation and from one another. In essence, a virtual environment represents a self-contained Python environment that holds third-party packages and maintains a connection to its parent environment. Packages within virtual environments are exclusively accessible to the interpreter residing in that specific environment.
