[SOLVED] Problem with virtualenv in Mac OS X

Issue

I've installed virtualenv via pip and get this error after creating a new environment:

selenium:~ auser$ virtualenv new  
New python executable in new/bin/python  
ERROR: The executable new/bin/python is not functioning  
ERROR: It thinks sys.prefix is u'/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/    Versions/2.6' (should be '/Users/user/new')  
ERROR: virtualenv is not compatible with this system or executable  

In my environment:

PYTHONPATH=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages  
PATH=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin  

How can I repair this?

Thanks.

Solution

If you continue to have trouble with virtualenv, you might try pythonbrew, instead. It's an alternate solution to the same problem. It works more like Ruby's rvm: It builds and creates an entire instance of Python, under $HOME/.pythonbrew, and then sets up some bash functions that allow you to switch easily between versions. Where virtualenv shadows the system version of Python, using symbolic links as part of its solution, pythonbrew builds entirely self-contained installations of Python.

I used virtualenv for years. It's a decent solution, but I've switched to pythonbrew lately. Having completely self-contained Python instances means that installing a new one takes awhile (since pythonbrew actually compiles Python from scratch), but the self-contained nature of each installation appeals to me. And disk is cheap.

Answered By - Brian Clapper