Why is virtualenvwrapper creating paths related to python2 instead of python3?

Question

I updated the versions of mkvirtualenv and virtualenv

$ sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

because my whole life I only used Python 2, and wanted to use -now- Python 3. The virtualenvwrapper had some issues.

Then I tried creating a virtual environment for my python3 installation:

$ mkvirtualenv py3test -p /usr/bin/python3

The environment is created in ~/.virtualenvs/py3test. Once active, I want to install a package I made:

(py3test)$ pip install python-cantrips (py3test)$ pip freeze

And the package is appropriately installed. Then I install ipython and run it:

(py3test)$ pip install ipython (py3test)$ ipython

And I enter ipython appropriately. But then I...

import cantrips

And it explodes with an ImportError. Then I check sys.path. And the issue is here: sys.path includes a path like: '/home/myuser/.virtualenvs/py3test/lib/python2.7/site-packages'. I don't remember whether the path is exact or not, since I am not in such computer right now. But I can have one thing for sure: the environment was created with python3 (the directory is not python2.7 but python3.5 in my virtualenv).

So: Why is virtualenv creating an environment for python3 but adding me the paths as if it was a python2.7 environment instead?

Answer 1

Found it!

There was no issue with virtualenv or virtualenvwrapper. The issue was with ipython. Actually, there is no issue specifically with ipython but with the way the scripts are accessible inside a virtualenv.

Globally, I had ipython installed (which works with the global python27). When I installed ipython in my local python3 environment, the (shell) path was not updated until I somehow refresh the environment again (e.g. deactivating, activating again). So when I tried again, the ipython was the appropriate (the local ipython in my environment with 3.5), and the generated path was the expected one.