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pythonubuntufile-permissionspython-venv

move python virtual env, permission problems

I recently move my python virtual environments to a different location. I first encountered the problem of certain packages being unavailable when I activated the venv. Now I get "Permission denied" on everything.

I changed every occurence of the previous path, in every file in the venv directory, to the new one so the sha-bangs would no longer be a problem. They don't seem to be anymore.

Previous questions related to this topic have mentioned the ownership of the directory as the potential problem. I am using an ubuntu machine and I am not very knowledgeable about Linux but when I ll these directories I can see that I own them. (the result of whoami anyway).

Problems only arose once I moved the venv directory. So I don't think it is related to the installing with sudo stuff that I also read about.

Any ideas? your help is hugely appreciated.

Solution

  • This is most likely a linux file permissions issue, as you mention yourself

    You can view the permissions on your files using ls -l

    This will list the files in your current directory in "long" format.

    eg:

    ls -l

drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root    68 Jun 13 20:25 tuned
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  4017 Feb 24  2022 vimrc

    To make sure you have the correct permissions you need to follow two steps:

    • step 1: Change ownership of the files
    • step 2: Change the permissions of the files

    Note that we are going to do this for the main directory of your project.

    Step 1: Change ownership

    you can change ownership of everything using this command:

    sudo chown -R user directory

    Replace user with your username (as returned by whoami)

    Replace directory with your project directory`

    -R means this is recursive and will affect all the subfiles and subdirectories.

    Step 2: Change permissions of the file

    you can change the access permissions using this command:

    sudo chmod -R 755 directory

    Replace directory with your project directory

    -R means this is recursive and will affect all the subfiles and subdirectories.

    755 is a permissions code. It stands for

    • owning user can read, write, execute
    • owning group can read and execute
    • everyone else can read and execute

    Once you've done this, you can check permissions again using ls -l. This will have changed permissions on all your subdirectories, including the files in your virtual environment.