Using virtualenv with PyPy

Thanks to the work that was recently done on the sys-prefix branch, it is now possible to use virtualenv with PyPy.

To try it, you need:

• a recent version of PyPy: PyPy 1.3 does not contain the necessary logic to work with virtualenv, so you need a more recent PyPy from subversion trunk. You can either build it by yourself or download one of our precompiled nightly builds
• a copy of virtualenv-pypy: this is a fork of virtualenv that contains all the patches needed to work with PyPy, and hopefully will be merged back at some point. It should be totally compatible with the official version of virtualenv, so it is safe to use it even to create non-PyPy environments. If you notice some weird behavior that does not happen with the standard virtualenv, please let us know.

The directory layout has been redesigned in a way that it is possible to use virtualenv to install a PyPy both from a precompiled tarball or from an svn checkout:

# from a tarball
$ virtualenv -p /opt/pypy-c-jit-76426-linux/bin/pypy my-pypy-env

# from the svn checkout
$ virtualenv -p /path/to/pypy-trunk/pypy/translator/goal/pypy-c my-pypy-env

Once the environment has been created, you can enter it as usual. Note that bin/python is now a symlink to bin/pypy.

Enjoy it :-)