Where should virtualenvs be created?

Many people use the virtualenvwrapper tool, which keeps all virtualenvs in the same place (the ~/.virtualenvs directory) and allows shortcuts for creating and keeping them there. For example, you might do:

mkvirtualenv djangoproject

and then later:

workon djangoproject

It's probably a bad idea to keep the virtualenv directory in the project itself, since you don't want to distribute it (it might be specific to your computer or operating system). Instead, keep a requirements.txt file using pip:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

and distribute that. This will allow others using your project to reinstall all the same requirements into their virtualenv with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Changing the location of the virtualenv directory breaks it

This is one advantage of putting the directory outside of the repository tree, e.g. under ~/.virtualenvs with virutalenvwrapper.

Otherwise, if you keep it in the project tree, moving the project location will break the virtualenv.

See: Renaming a virtualenv folder without breaking it

There is --relocatable but it is known to not be perfect.

Another minor advantage: you don't have to .gitignore it.

The advantages of putting it gitignored in the project tree itself are:

• keeps related stuff close together.
• you will likely never reuse a given virtualenv across projects, so putting it somewhere else does not give much advantage

The generally accepted place to put them is the same place that the default installation of virtualenvwrapper puts them: ~/.virtualenvs

Related: virtualenvwrapper is an excellent tool that provides shorthands for the common virtualenv commands. http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/virtualenvwrapper/