When we want to do anything with our python virtual environment in terminal/command prompt/shell, we have to activate it by navigating to the scripts folder. But, what does this activation do?
I can access the contents of the virtualenv folder in file explorer without activating it.
At its core, the main purpose of Python virtual environments is to create an isolated environment for Python projects. This means that each project can have its own dependencies, regardless of what dependencies every other project has.
More interesting are the activate scripts in the bin directory. These scripts are used to set up your shell to use the environment’s Python executable and its site-packages by default.
After activating the environment, we’re now getting a different path for the python executable because, in an active environment, the $PATH environment variable is slightly modified.