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pythonlinuxubuntuvirtualenvpyenv

Moving .pyenv folder to another partition, symlinking

This question is related to programming environment setup for python.

I have run out of space on my home folder on Ubuntu. Python shims are stored in their default location ~/.pyenv and taking up a lot of space. To create space, I want to move the whole of .pyenv folder to another partition.

In my understanding, this should be as simple as cut-pasting the `.pyenv' folder to its desired location and creating a soft link at its original location, pointing to this new location. Something like:

ln -s ~/drive2/.pyenv ~/.pyenv

( Where the other disc is mounted at ~/drive2/ )

However, the solutions I see online are much more 'involved'. Here's one example

Am I missing something? Only possible issue I can think of is having too many levels of symlink .

Solution

  • To answer my own question , this worked well, exactly as expected. The pyenv root directory (/home/usename/.pyenv ) contained a lot of symlinks but all the relative links pointed to sub-folders inside the .pyenv directory itself. Given this, moving the whole folder to another drive did not cause any problems. Here's the process I followed-

    1. Copy (but not cut) the .pyenv folder recursively to desired location, say ~/drive2/.pyenv
    2. Rename the original .pyenv folder to something else and keep it for the time being, in case something goes wrong
    3. Create a soft link to replace the original .pyenv folder and point it to your new location. For example: ln -s ~/drive2/.pyenv ~/.pyenv
    4. Test the system by running some python code that uses virtual environments
    5. If all is satisfactory, delete the renamed folder in step 2 to reclaim the space

    I am quite sure the same system will work on Windows with the mkLink command with the \D switch, but someone will have to confirm this.