Packages not installed in sys.path

Question

I am python noob. They installed virtualenv and pip, and everything looks fine for me, but when I try to import packages installed through pip, python does not find them. I am on OS X and have a python 2.6 system in /usr/bin , so I installed 2.7 in /usr/local/bin through the package installer. When installing pip and virtualenv, I made sure that 2.7 python was used by setting PATH /usr/local/bin .

 (pysite) sbeam@pris ~/Sites]$ pip freeze Django==1.4 Markdown==2.1.1 psycopg2==2.4.5 wsgiref==0.1.2 (pysite) sbeam@pris ~/Sites]$ echo $PYTHONPATH (pysite) sbeam@pris ~/Sites]$ which python /Users/sbeam/.virtualenvs/pysite/bin/python (pysite) sbeam@pris ~/Sites]$ env | grep VIRTUAL VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PROJECT_FILENAME=.project VIRTUAL_ENV=/Users/sbeam/.virtualenvs/pysite VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_HOOK_DIR=/Users/sbeam/.virtualenvs VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_LOG_DIR=/Users/sbeam/.virtualenvs (pysite) sbeam@pris ~/Sites]$ python Python 2.7.3 (v2.7.3:70274d53c1dd, Apr 9 2012, 20:52:43) [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import sys >>> from pprint import pprint as pp >>> pp(sys.path) ['', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/distribute-0.6.27-py2.7.egg', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip-0.7.2-py2.7.egg', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python27.zip', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-darwin', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/plat-mac/lib-scriptpackages', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-tk', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-old', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload', '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages'] >>> import markdown Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> ImportError: No module named markdown 

Answer 1

Please note that by design and request, new versions (1.7+) of virtualenv do not include site-packages from the system by default.

http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/news.html

You can explicitly use --system-site-packages to create a virtual virtual server to see:

http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/index.html#the-system-site-packages-option

Or you can simply draw the freeze output and in virtualenv do pip install -r requirements.txt