a good introduction - I would like to hear more about deployment with virtualenv though - is it expected that you just document any packages with requirements.txt and then you would create the virtualenv in the deployment target and set everything up again? Or can you "package" a virtualenv for deployment?
Just generate your requirements file from your env locally (pip freeze > requirements.txt), deploy all of your files (env folder excluded) to your sever however you want and then run 'env/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt' on your server.
If I use pip freeze > requirements.txt, it lists the packages I have installed using pip, but it doesn't list anything for the python version itself. How do I make sure the right python version gets captured if I don't check in the /env/ folder?
Deployment/distribution can be handled by bundling the app. For Python 2.x, there's PyInstaller[0], Py2App[1], Py2Exe[2] all of which do much the same thing: make a single binary out of a python app and all its dependencies including the interpreter. Then you distribute that and don't worry about what the user has or hasn't got.
