Deactivating a Virtual Environment
Once you've completed your work in a virtual environment, it's important to deactivate it properly. This ensures your global Python environment isn’t affected by any changes made inside the virtual environment.
How to Deactivate a Virtual Environment
To deactivate a virtual environment, regardless of the operating system, run the following command in your terminal:
deactivateThis command exits the virtual environment and reverts your terminal to the system-wide Python installation.
What Happens When You Deactivate?
- The environment variables specific to your virtual environment are reset.
- Your terminal returns to its default state, using the global Python installation.
- Your prompt no longer shows the
(myenv)tag.
Reactivating a Virtual Environment
If you want to return to your virtual environment, simply use the appropriate activate command for your OS:
- Windows:
myenv\Scripts\activate - macOS/Linux:
source myenv/bin/activate
Conclusion
Deactivating your virtual environment is a simple process but critical to managing your project environments effectively. Now, let’s move on to managing dependencies using requirements.txt in the next subtopic.
