virtualenv that can find relocated libraires (like mysqlclient lib for MySQLdb)

Question

I would like to be able to share a virtualenv that is self contained, i.e. insure that all scripts installed are able to run directly without needing to set anything. E.g. I

Answer 1

This is maybe not the best solution, but you can hack the virtualenv active script to set some environment variable (this is a script that we will need to use anyway). In the installation script of the virtualenv, I added:

echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH' >> /path/to/virtualenv/activate

Now every time someone uses my virtualenv, it also includes the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to find the mysql libraries.

Drawbacks I can see:

• Don't work nicely with virtualenv's deactivate

• Won't help if you want to distribute your package with the standard distutils setup.py.