In the hopes of future proofing my development projects I've been making an effort to use Python 3 for any new work. While this has generally been a good experience, I initially found it difficult to get virtual environments running on Python 3.4.

After some digging through the Python 3 docs <https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/venv.html> and reading through a few Ask Ubuntu and StackOverflow pages I wanted to publish the shell scripts that I found to work.

These comands show how I configured a virtual environment in my /home/matt folder called "venv-test". Let's run the following lines from the terminal and explore the benefits.

$ python3 -m venv venv-test

Which came back with an error I found weird.

The virtual environment was not created successfully because ensurepip is not available.
On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you need to install the python3-venv package using the following command.
apt-get install python3-venv
You may need to use sudo with that command.  After installing the python3-venv package, recreate your virtual environment.

I had expected that Python 3.4 would come with venv configured, but let's install it anyway.

$ apt-get install python3-venv

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package python3-venv

Well that wasn't what I expected. As it turns out the easier way to configure the virtual environment is to initialize the venv "without pip", install pip within the virtual environment, and then restart the virtual environment.

$ python3 -m venv venv-test --without-pip
$ source venv-test/bin/activate
(venv-test) $ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | python
(venv-test) $ deactivate
$ source venv-test/bin/activate
(venv-test) $ pip freeze

wheel==0.26.0

Perfect, we've configured a virtual environment with a clean set of dependencies, and there is a further bonus:

(venv-test) $ python

Python 3.4.3 (default, Oct 14 2015, 20:28:29)
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> phrase = "Virtual environment working"
>>> print (phrase)
Virtual environment working

Running the tradionally 2.7 command "python" now drops us into a Python 3.4 shell.

In order to use your new virtual environment go ahead and use "pip install" as you otherwise would to install packages into your new Python 3.4 environment.