#pip

Of all the reasons Python is a hit with developers, one of the biggest is its broad and ever-expanding selection of third-party packages. Convenient toolkits for everything from ingesting and formatting data to high-speed math and machine learning are just an import or pip install away. But what happens when those packages don’t play nice with each other? What do you do when different Python projects need competing or incompatible versions of the same add-ons? That’s where Python virtual environments come into play. What are Python virtual environments? A virtual environment is a way to have multiple, parallel instances of the Python interpreter, each with different sets of packages and different configurations. Each virtual environment contains a discrete copy of the Python interpreter, including copies of its support utilities (such as the package manager pip). The packages installed in each virtual environment are seen only in that virtual environment and no other. Even large, compl