Strange “local” folder inside virtualenv folder

Question

After I create my virtualenv environment (VE), inside it there is a symbolic link named "local". It points to the VE folder, which means that if you open it you end up in the same folder that you started in.

I wouldn't care about that, but it makes some autocompletion "wizards" in PyCharm unusable (they show the same item over and over again, each time with a deeper nesting level).

Somehow I cannot find any hint about this problem (I'm using virtualenv 1.6.4).

The question is: what's that "local" symlink used for ?

Answer 1

According to the source the local symlink was put in place as a fix for a bug that affected platforms using the "posix_local" install scheme . This change was introduced in version 1.6.3 .

The problem you described has been addressed by this pull request on github. This proposed patch changes the symlinks to point to an actual local directory rather than the parent directory. It is yet to be merged. This patch has since been applied so the problem should be fixed in the next release (1.7.1 perhaps?).