Simon Willison’s Weblog

Is it true that Ruby is more deployment friendly than Python?

6th January 2012

My answer to Is it true that Ruby is more deployment friendly than Python? on Quora

He’s incorrect (or at least out of date). Most professional python programmers that I know of use virtualenv, which makes it easy for deployed Python code to live in its own environment with its own set of modules installed separately from the core system packages.

Even before virtualenv it wasn’t at all hard to isolate packages—before I started using virtualenv my deployed Python projects all used to add their own lib/ directory to the beginning of the sys.path array on their first line, before importing any modules.