Lesson 41 / 49

Virtual Environments & pip

Isolate project dependencies with virtual environments and manage packages with pip and requirements.txt.

Why isolate?

A virtual environment gives a project its own private set of installed packages, separate from your system Python.

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install requests pandas
pip freeze > requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements.txt   # on another machine

What to commit

Always commit requirements.txt, never the .venv folder itself — it's large and machine-specific.