Cloning or copying a virtual environment

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I recently came across a situation where I had to copy my virtual environment and paste it into another directory. This worked perfectly fine. But I noticed that the VIRTUAL_ENV path inside the “activate” file was still pointed to the original directory from where it is copied from.

I searched for ways to completely clone a virtual environment from one directory to another. The following method was much simpler and worked perfectly fine.

How does it work?

1. Install the virtualenv-clone inside the virtual environment which you wish to copy elsewhere.

$ pip install virtualenv-clone

2. We need to run the following command providing the path of the original virtualenv directory and the target directory.

$ virtualenv-clone source/venv target/venv

That is it. The new virtual environment will be cloned to the target directory. We can go to the target directory, activate the virtual environment, and get started.