Broken references in Virtualenvs

Question

I recently installed a bunch of dotfiles on my Mac along with some other applications (I changed to iTerm instead of Terminal, and Sublime as my default text editor) but eve

Answer 1

I was facing the same issue after upgrading brew on my OSX Catalina.

After trying bunch of stuffs, I find the following is the best and easy solution.

At first, delete the virtual env. (Optional)

find myvirtualenv -type l -delete

then recreate a new virtualenv

virtualenv myvirtualenv

Reference: https://www.jeremycade.com/python/osx/homebrew/2015/03/02/fixing-virtualenv-after-a-python-upgrade/

Answer 2

A update version @Chris Wedgwood's answer for keeping site-packages (keeping packages installed)

cd ~/.virtualenv/name_of_broken_venv


mv lib/python2.7/site-packages ./    
rm -rf .Python bin lib include
virtualenv .
rm -rf lib/python2.7/site-packages
mv ./site-packages lib/python2.7/

Answer 3

If you've busted python3 just try brew upgrade python3 that fixed it for me.

Answer 4

If this was caused by a brew upgrade that upgraded its Python, and you're ok with downgrading to the previous version, try brew switch python [previous version], eg brew switch python 3.6.5. From here.

Answer 5

virtualenvwrapper instructions

As indicated in the accepted answer, the root cause is likely a homebrew update that means your virtualenv symlinks are pointing at broken python paths - see details here.

For each virtual env, you need to reassign the symlinks to point at the correct python path (in brew cellar). Here is how to do it with virtualenvwrapper. Here I am updating a virtual env called "my-example-env".

cd ~/PYTHON_ENVS
find ./my-example-env -type l -delete
mkvirtualenv my-example-env

All done.

Answer 6

I had a broken virtual env due to a Homebrew reinstall of python (thereby broken symlinks) and also a few "sudo pip install"s I had done earlier. Weizhong's tips were very helpful in fixing the issues without having to reinstall packages. I also had to do the following for the mixed permissions problem.

sudo chown -R my_username lib/python2.7/site-packages