Checking if running inside a virtual environment

suggest change

Sometimes the shell prompt doesn’t display the name of the virtual environment and you want to be sure if you are in a virtual environment or not.

Run the python interpreter and try:

import sys
sys.prefix
sys.real_prefix

For virtual environments created using the standard library venv module there is no sys.real_prefix. Instead, check whether sys.base_prefix is the same as sys.prefix.

Feedback about page:

Feedback:
Optional: your email if you want me to get back to you:


Virtual environments:
* Checking if running inside a virtual environment

Table Of Contents
2 Filter
3 List
7 Loops
22 Reduce
27 Classes
31 Set
40 Virtual environments
42 Tuple
45 Enum
62 Sockets
89 urllib
92 Idioms
104 Stack
105 Profiling
109 Logging
111 os module
118 Mixins
120 ArcPy
126 Arrays
132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
138 Neo4j
140 Curses
141 Templates
145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
155 pyglet
157 ijson
160 Flask
161 Groupby
163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve