Virtualenv, Django and PyCharm. File structure
virtualenv is not just a list of dependencies! It actually has all the modules under its umbrella. Think of a virtualenv as a space which isolates all the packages used by your project from the rest of the other packages that were installed previously or at a later time.Yes, there is an option to have the virtualenv make use of packages that are "outside" of the environment but that's just an option.
The main purpose of having an virtualenv is to enable the user to use packages versions of his choice and keep them isolated from the rest of the space. Usually, the list of packages belonging to a specific virtualenv are captured into a file, requirements.txt. If you want to run the project on a different machine or share it with someone, having requirements.txt will make it easy to recreate the environment via pip install -r requirement.txt from within virtualenv
I am newbie using VirtualEnv and recently try to create one using PyCharm. During the process, PyCharm ask me to specify the project location, application name and VirtualEnv name and location. My doubt is, after I specify the name and location of the VirtualEnv the location of the Django project files must be inside the VirtualEnv? or it's possible to have the VirtualEnv files in a different location than the Django project files?
Maybe I am not understanding the purpose of the VirtualEnv. Perhaps, VirtualEnv it's just a list of the dependencies of my project, Python version, Django version, Pip version, Jinja2 version and all other required files, but not necessarily the Django application files (the website that is being developed).
Thanks in advance.