Can I change an an existing virtualenv to ignore global site packages? (like --no-site-package on a new one)

Question

Hello,

I can create a new virtualenv that ignores global site-packages with "--no-site-package". Is it possible to change an existing virtualenv (which was created without "--no-site-package") to also ignore the global site-packages? (So that it workes like it was created with "--no-site-package" in the first place.)

thanks in advance,

Sebastian

Answer 1

Can you just create a new one and then re-create it with the --no-site-package? If you use pip then you can use pip freeze > requirements.pip to generate a requirements file to re-install into your new virtualenv.

Answer 2

I think all you have to do is create an empty file called no-global-site-packages.txt and put it into the virtualenv's python2.x folder (eg, lib/python2.6/, the one with all the modules). Then the normal site.py generated by virtualenv detects the difference and handles everything from there.