I have often found that when dealing with multiple branches and refactoring patches I get caught out by left over *.pyc files from python files that don’t exist on this branch. This bit me again recently so I went looking for options.
A useful environment variable that I found via some stackoverflow questions is: PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE which, when set, prevents python from writing .pyc and .pyo files. This is not something that I want to set permanently on my machine but is great for development.
The other tool I use for all my python projects is virtualenvwrapper which allows you to isolate project dependencies and environments in what I think is a more intuitive way than with virtualenv directly.
Armed with the simple idea that these two concepts should be able to work together I found I was not the first person to think of this. There are other guides out there but the basic concept is simply to set PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE when we activate a virtualenv and reset it when we deactivate it.
Easy.
Add to ~/.virtualenvs/postactivate:
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Add to ~/.virtualenvs/predeactivate:
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