A Z shell wrapper for Ian Bicking's virtualenv, loosely based on Adam Brenecki's virtualfish for the Fish shell.

Once installed, VirtualZ provides the vz command. Try the following:

vz new myvirtualenv
echo ${VIRTUAL_ENV}
which python
vz new othervirtualenv
echo ${VIRTUAL_ENV}
vz deactivate
vz rm myvirtualenv
vz rm othervirtualenv

When creating a new environment, the additional parameters passed to the vz new command are passed down to the virtualenv command. For example, this can be used to specify which python executable to use:

vz new env-with-pypy -p /usr/bin/pypy

or to allow usage of packages installed system-wide:

vz new with-system-pkgs --system-site-packages

The recommended way is to use a plugin manager. By default, the location where VirtualZ looks for virtualenvs is ~/.virtualenvs. This can be changed by setting the desired path in the ${VIRTUALZ_HOME} variable.

With zgen, add the following to your .zshrc:

zgen load aperezdc/virtualz

When a virtualenv is active, the following variables are defined:

• VIRTUAL_ENV contains the full path to the active environment.
• VIRTUAL_ENV_NAME contains the name of the active environment.

For example, the following will prepend the name of the current virtualenv to your existing prompt, but only if there's an environment active:

PROMPT='${VIRTUAL_ENV_NAME:+${VIRTUAL_ENV_NAME} }${PROMPT}'