If you simply wish to access a virtualenv from your system ipython, you could do: with open('path/to/venv/bin/activate_this.py') as fh: exec(fh.rea

If you simply wish to access a virtualenv from your system ipython, you could do: with open('path/to/venv/bin/activate_this.py') as fh: exec(fh.read(), {'__file__' : fh.name}) Actually, having a %workon magic command for virtualenvwrapper[1] users seems like a useful thing. I think I'll write that ... [1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenvwrapper http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenvwrapper