There is no activate when I am trying to run my virtual env

Question

1) I installed virtualenv using pip.
2) I ran the command virtualenv venv
3) Then I ran source venv/bin/activate but it says that there is no such file or directory.

When I cd into venv/bin I find 3 things - python, python 2.7, and python 3.5. Does anyone know the problem?

Plum

Just to check: what OS are you running this on? (Windows virtualenv, at least the one in front of me, puts activate in the scripts directory but then again, it also puts python in there vs bin) (Also, what other directories does venv have?) – Harvell

I'm running it on mac osx. Venv also has include and lib. I feel like I downloaded too many versions of python now its screwing everything up. – Plum

Hmm... I'm not used to virtualenv dropping down both python 2.7 and 3.5 as the result of running the command once... can you run virtualenv new-venv-18-Jan (or some other name that you've absolutely never used before), and include all the output you get from running that command? (Assuming you still don't get activate in the new virtualenv) – Harvell

Its says: New python executable in... Installing setuptools, pip, wheel... Complete output from command... ImportError: dlopen ... Symbol not found ... Expected in: flat namespace ...Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done. setuptools pip wheel failed with error code 1 Thats pretty much a summary of what it says – Plum

So you ran sudo pip install virtualenv on your system Python? You really aren't giving us much help here ... – Kenaz

For some weird reason the activate files were created without the execute file privileges (664 to be precise). Changing the permissions didn't help though. – Whale

@AshishNitinPatil This is intentional. You shouldn't execute activate, but source it e.g. "source activate" or ". activate" (note space) – Handicapped

Answer 1

i have had the same problem. and what i did is just run the command virtualenv env again. And then more files were generated under directory env/bin, including the activate file. it's so weird.

Adulterer

This works. Slightly disconcerting that we don't know why. Not all the scripts were actually present in the bin directory. – Lacrosse

You might have moved the env folder after creating it the first time. – Uniplanar

The exact same thing occurred to me. Running virtualenv venv twice solved the problem. Never happened to me before. – Regnal

I followed this advice and re-run the virtualenv env command. BUT interestingly my terminal prompted: The virtual environment was not created successfully because ensurepip is not available. On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you need to install the python3-venv package using the following command. apt install python3.10-venv which didn't yell these initially. I installed the package and it works like a charm. hope this might help someone. OS: ubuntu 22.04 pyhton3: v3.10.4 – Der

When I used poetry to setup a venv it didn't include the activate/deactivate scripts. – Lobito

Answer 2

According to Python doc, the installation step is

$ python3 -m pip install --user virtualenv

$ python3 -m venv env

The last command gives a warning message,

The virtual environment was not created successfully because ensurepip is not
available.  On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you need to install the python3-venv
package using the following command.

    apt-get install python3-venv

You may need to use sudo with that command.  After installing the python3-venv
package, recreate your virtual environment.

$ sudo apt-get install python3-venv

Now, activate is available.

Umber

apt install python3.12-venv followed by python3 -m venv env worked fine for me. Thanks – Soinski

Answer 3

I solved the similar problem running python3.7 -m venv venv, you can change for your version of python that is installed in your enviroment.

Estebanesteem

Does anyone understand why the activate file disappeared? – Parchment

Similar solution: python -m venv .venv works, python3 -m venv .venv does not include the activate.bat and other files. I did not have the time to tshoot, just adding confirmation. – Michamichael

Answer 4

This is old but just wanted to add an answer that might be the case, though I can't be sure.

However this same thing happened to me when I accidentally ran python -m venv venv before installing python-venv (change according to your python version) in Ubuntu. Most likely after I installed python-venv and ran it again it didn't overwrite the existing venv folder. Had to remove manually and rerun command.

Arlettaarlette

Answer 5

I solved a similar problem by naming it venv2 when I ran virtualenv. I already had a virtual environment named venv for another project. This allowed me to proceed.

Meso

It seems to have a problem with the name venv – Colitis

Answer 6

I experienced this problem when using the --upgrade option. Removed the option, and all ran as expected.

Churchman

Answer 7

I had this happen on rasbian when I hadn't installed python3-pip before creating the venv.

Zumwalt

Answer 8

I double it is caused by some networking issue, I run it twice to get 'activate' script installed. Maybe first it can't connect to some source so it just abort installation.

Merrow

Answer 9

I had this same problem with virtualenv and python3.11.

Everytime i tried to create the venv with

• virtualenv --python=/usr/local/bin/python3.11 venv

there was no bin folder.

Installing virtualenv with the right pip first, solved the problem for me:

python3.11 -m pip install --upgrade virtualenv
virtualenv --python=/usr/local/bin/python3.11 venv

Canned

Answer 10

1. Install Virtualenv: https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/installation.html
2. Create virtual environment: virtualenv venv -p python3
3. Activate: source venv/bin/activate

Continental