Where should virtualenvs go in production

Question

When using virtualenv (or virtualenvwrapper), the recommended practice is to group all your virtual environments together. For example in ~/.virtualenvs

But, I've noticed in reading a number of articles on deploying Django applications, that the recommendation seems to be to put your virtual environments somewhere under the root of the individual web application. For example in /srv/www/example.com/venv.

Why and how Would it matter if I went one way or the other? And is one way recommended over another?

Answer 1

Arguments for grouping in a common folder

• Cleaner management of multiple venvs on a given machine. Good tools to support checking which are available, adding new ones, purging old ones, etc.
• More sensible (and more space-efficient) when sharing one or more venvs across more than one project
• Allows the use of some nice features like auto-completion of venv names

Arguments for keeping with the project

• Clear relationship between the venv and the project. Eliminates any ambiguity and less error-prone since there's little chance of running the wrong venv for a project (which is not always immediately evident).
• Makes more sense when there is a one-to-one relationship between venvs and projects
• May be the preferred approach when working in teams from separate accounts.
• More straightforward when deploying across identical hosts; (just rsync the whole project). Nothing stopping you from doing this with a venv in a common folder, but it feels more natural to deploy a single tree.
• Easier to sandbox the whole application.