Installation | Maintenance | Beyond Lino

Managing multiple virtual environments

This document explains how to easily switch Lino versions individually on a server which hosts several Lino sites.

This document is not finshed, and there is no warranty.

For each Lino version “offered” on your server you create a new virtualenv. We suggest to create all virtualenvs in a central root directory named ~/pythonenvs.

Name your environments simply “a”, “b”, “c” etc. (or find other names in alphabetical order), do not name them “dev”, “testing” or “prod”. Because a given environment is normally first used for testing and then for production. And virtual environments cannot be renamed.

In the project directory of every Lino site you create a symbolic link named env which points to the root directory of the virtualenv to be used by that site.

You can then easily switch between environments because Lino, Django and Apache activates them using the symbolic link env in their project directory.

You can add an alias to your .bash_aliases:

alias a='. env/bin/activate'

In your wsgy.py file you can add something like:

import site
pth = '/my/project/dir/env/lib/python2.7/site-packages'
site.addsitedir(pth)