this is a good example of a "simple versus easy" trade off [1] , i.e. this is something that is easier to get started at some expense of simplicity: it is over-

this is a good example of a "simple versus easy" trade off [1] , i.e. this is something that is easier to get started at some expense of simplicity: it is over-complicated & hides complexity behind a simple interface, but not in a way that is reliable - so eventually things will break and then you'll be strictly more confused than if you did things in a less easy but simpler way - learning a bit about dependency management & setting up a reproducible environment for running your python script/app. that said, it is an amusing hack to run the virtualenv'd python in a subprocess and then extract the environment vars and inject them into the already running python process. some of the code could be cleaned up a bit -- e.g. it could be using https://docs.python.org/3/library/tempfile.html#tempfile.TemporaryDirectory https://docs.python.org/3/library/tempfile.html#tempfile.Tem... to just ask for a uniquely named temp dir, some of the subprocess invocations dont appear to have error handling, etc. for my python hobby project these days i only depend upon packages i can install using apt in debian stable. containers for isolation help too. [1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/