Today I wanted to move the location of my virtual environments to Dropbox. Makes life easier if I ever have to change computers. I moved the directory that contains the virtual environments and set the system variable WORKON_HOME to the new location. Then I tried it out. Activating the virtual environment with command workon worked just fine. Then I wanted to switch to the virtual environment with the command cdvirtualenv and it failed with an error saying that the location did not exist.

Puzzled I checked the system variables with the command set (I’m running Windows 10) and I noticed the system variable VIRTUAL_ENV that was pointing to the old location. I checked my variable settings under “System” → “Advanced system settings” → “Environment Variables” and could not find it there. Which meant it was being set somewhere when activating the virtual environment. After searching all the virtualenvwrapper-win scripts I could not find “SET VIRTUAL ENV=”. Then I noticed that the “workon.bat” file called “activate.bat” located in the script directory of the virtual environment. Here I found the “SET VIRTUAL ENV=” which contained a hard coded location, which was the old WORKON_HOME location as the virtual environment already existed.

To fix the problem I had to change this line of each “activate.bat” file manually. After that it worked like a dream. Problem solved!

By the way this isn’t a virtualenvwrapper-win problem, but a virtualenv problem.

UPDATE 4-1-2017

During a little break laying in the bath I came up with a much quicker and easier approach to solving the problem… Creating a symbolic link from the old location to the new location.

Just fire up a console with administrator rights and execute the following command.

mklink /d <old directory location> <new directory location>

Hmmmmm, that was quick 🙂