add2virtualenv (virtualenv wrapper) does not work with scipy

Question

I want to create a virtualenv without global python packages, but with the scipy distribution that is shared; installing scipy takes quite a while and I don\'t want to go th

Answer 1

So, to summarize, the actual problem here is that the directory including the packages to be imported must be used, instead of the specific package. That is, instead of

add2virtualenv /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/scipy

It should be

add2virtualenv /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages

Beware: this solution has the drawback that you do not only include scipy, but any other packages in /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages.

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An alternate, space-efficent solution could be symlinking scipy directory inside the virtual env's site-package. This can be done, in your virtual env, through:

cdsitepackages
ln -s /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/scipy scipy

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All credits go to @rubik (see the comments)

Check out this answer to find your site-packages path in case it is different than the one used here.