One of the first things that people coming from the Ruby / Rails world and entering the amazing world of Python / Django ( ahem ) want to know is what is the equivalent of rvm? Or to be more generic, how does one manage their “pythons” and the manage their “gemsets”

I see that newcomers to Python are still being pointed to virtualenv and then to the virtualenvwrapper which apparently makes working with virtualenv much easier. As someone coming back to the world of Python, from the days of installing all the packages for every project that your are working on system wide, I too, was led towards the aforementioned duo.

Until I came across pythonbrew, that is. It describes itself rather modestly as “..a program to automate the building and installation of Python in the users $HOME”, and claims to be inspired by rvm itself.

What many don’t seem to realize is that pythonbrew itself is a wrapper to virtualenv and allows the ability to manage virtual environments in addition to your pythons. The interface is consistent and it does more than what virtualenv or virtualenvwrapper do.

This is how you create and use virtual environments with pythonbrew:

pythonbrew venv create proj
pythonbrew venv use proj

This is how you do it with virtualenv:

virtualenv proj
source bin/activate

Bit better with virtualenvwrapper:

mkvirtualenv proj #this also activates it
#later
workon proj

Can you see the consistency in interface with pythonbrew that I am talking about? One you start with pythonbrew, you know where to go next. What the next step would be. Maybe I am spoilt by rvm, but pythonbrew just seems to be right approach here for me. The fact that it uses virtualenv under the wraps means you can always go down a level and use it directly.

With the 2.7.x python and 3.x python being used simultaneously, I surely hope people do need easy ways to install and use multiple pythons, in addition to managing the packages.

I have been using pythonbrew in my Django project and have had absolutely no problems with it. I had no problems setting up Pycharm with it, as well. It is exactly what I needed, without the complexity of the virtualenv interface, with a consistent way of doing things, and similarity to rvm.

So my question to pythonistas is, why do you still use / recommend virtualenv ( alone ) when there is pythonbrew? Or am is just reading old docs and blogs?