Python virtualenv weirdness

After getting pissed off again trying to work my way through front end (Angular 4…) training the last two days, I finally reached my breaking point and rage quit. Not having any fun, need to take a break and do something that’s actually interesting/enjoyable for me. So I decided that I’d go ahead and work on one of the Python courses I’d also previously picked up. All was well until I hit a point where 1: I needed to install the cv3 image processing; and 2: using global packages with virtualenv.

Setting up CV3 for mac

The first issue was a mac specific issue. Probably the first time where the installation was actually more difficult for mac than it was for Windows. The instructions provided in the lesson were old/out of date and suggested using python2 for the rest of everything as the python3 version wasn’t ready. Googling around showed that CV3 for python3 has been ready for a while and working. Which then brought me to the point of trying to install it.

I came across this posting here for how to get it installed. In my case I was able to skip almost everything on this page and simply run step 5.1. In doing so, brew installed the following packages for me:

sqlite, gdbm, python3, python, eigen, lame, x264, xvid, ffmpeg, jpeg, libpng, libtiff, ilmbase, openexr, numpy, tbb

With that I was then able to access cv3 globally by starting python3 and importing cv2 (why is this 2? I don’t understand yet….).

venv weirdness

So my next goal was to be able to create virtual environments that would be able to use this global value. Some googling led me to find the --system-site-packages parameter when creating a new virtual environment. Great! This should solve all my problems!

But no, this only seemed to create a new problem. When generating the virtualenvironment using python3 -m venv numpy --system-site-packages, sourcing in, and then pip installing my packages, I found that the installed packages were not accessible (ipython and jupyter in my case). Trying to launch either would spit out errors about the files not existing. Bummer.

Then I noticed that this was not the command that I was used to running when generating virtual environments. So I tried the virtualenv -p python3 numpy --system-site-packages method that I’m used to using, and success! All of my packages are loading now and I’ve got access to the global (cv2) that I need. Why does this work? Dunno. Too late to look into it now.

Bonus

Because I cannot ever remember this, maybe posting it will help it stick. To check to the full size of a folder and all of its contents on linux/unix, use: du -sh <file_path>. That will give you the size of the folder and all contents.