Activating virtualenv

In our manual exercise earlier in this chapter, we created a virtual environment from scratch using virtualenv. Once the environment is created, you must activate it in order to use it. An obvious question might be “How do I activate the environment?” Here’s the beautiful answer: you don’t have to. While you are in the IDE, the environment settings are always there and are always honored. When you add new third-party packages from the Python Package Index (PyPI), which we’ll cover shortly, they automatically go to the right place per your environment settings.

When we run our program, we can override the run configuration, but by default, it uses the project’s environment setting. Frankly, it’s rare that the override in the run configuration is useful. With that said, I’ll show you how to override the run configuration later in this chapter.

Using the integrated terminal

Another place to worry about...