Your first simple tutorial on Python development under Debian. -- Discovering virtualenv on debian

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First things first, let's install python, a nice editor, and pip (a tool to install python packages easily):

sudo apt-get install python geany python-pip

Then, we need virtualenv to create a virtual environment where our python configuration can differ from the one used in other directories. This is pretty useful to manage dependencies cleanly.

I recommend this good tutorial about virtualenv.

sudo pip install virtualenv
mkdir virtualenv_1 

virtualenv_1 will be our virtual environment.

virtualenv virtualenv_1
cd virtualenv_1 

we activate this environment when we want to use it for a programming project for instance or to modify it (e.g., add python packages)

source  ./bin/activate 

The prompt changes to show that we are in our virtual environment. Let's install yolk to list the python packages available in the virtual environment.

pip install yolk
yolk -l 

We obtain a short list of packages

Python          - 2.6.6        - active development (/usr/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload)
distribute      - 0.6.10       - active 
pip             - 0.7.2        - active 
wsgiref         - 0.1.2        - active development (/usr/lib/python2.6)
yolk            - 0.4.3        - active 

Finally, we check the bin/activate script of our virtualenv to verify the value of the PYTHONPATH environment variable.