Make virtualenv inherit specific packages from your global site-packages
python, virtualenv
Solution
Create the environment with `virtualenv --system-site-packages` . Then, activate the virtualenv and when you want things installed in the virtualenv rather than the system python, use `pip install --ignore-installed` or `pip install -I` . That way pip will install what you've requested locally even though a system-wide version exists. Your python interpreter will look first in the virtualenv's package directory, so those packages should shadow the global ones.
Problem
I'm looking for a way to make a virtualenv which will contain just some libraries (which I chose) of the base python installation. To be more concrete, I'm trying to import my matplotlib to virtualenv during the creation of virtualenv. It can't be installed efficiently with pip or easy_install since it misses some fortran compiler libs. The way I did it until now was to manually copy from: ``` /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ to virtualenv_name/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/ ``` However this prevents the manully imported links to be registerd by yolk (which prints all currently available libs in virtualenv). So, is there a way to do a selective variant of the ``` virtualenv --system-site-packages ```