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I'm working on several Python projects who run on various versions of Python. I'm hoping to set up my vim environment to use ropevim, pyflakes, and pylint but I've run into some issues caused by using a single vim (compiled for a specific version of Python which doesn't match the project's Python version).

I'm hoping to build vim into each of my virtualenv directories but I've run into an issue and I can't get it to work. When I try to build vim from source, despite specifying the Python config folder in my virtualenv, the system-wide Python interpreter is always used.

Currently, I have Python 2.6.2 and Python 2.7.1 installed with several virtualenvs created from each version. I'm using Ubuntu 10.04 where the system-default Python is 2.6.5. Every time I compile vim and call :python import sys; print(sys.version) it returns Python 2.6.5.

configure --prefix=/virtualenv/project --enable-pythoninterp=yes --with-python-config-dir=/virtualenv/project/lib/python2.6/config

Results in the following in config.log:

...
configure:5151: checking --enable-pythoninterp argument
configure:5160: result: yes
configure:5165: checking for python
configure:5195: result: /usr/bin/python
...

It should be /virtualenv/project/bin/python. Is there any way to specify the Python interpreter for vim to use?

NOTE: I can confirm that /virtualenv/project/bin appears at the front of PATH environment variable.

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
13

I'd recommend building vim against the 2 interpreters, then invoking it using the shell script I provided below to point it to a particular virtualenv.

I was able to build vim against Python 2.7 using the following command (2.7 is installed under $HOME/root):

% LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/root/lib PATH=$HOME/root/bin:$PATH \
    ./configure --enable-pythoninterp \ 
    --with-python-config-dir=$HOME/root/lib/python2.7/config \
    --prefix=$HOME/vim27
% make install
% $HOME/bin/vim27

:python import sys; print sys.path[:2]
['/home/pat/root/lib/python27.zip', '/home/pat/root/lib/python2.7']

Your virtualenv is actually a thin wrapper around the Python interpreter it was created with -- $HOME/foobar/lib/python2.6/config is a symlink to /usr/lib/python2.6/config.

So if you created it with the system interpreter, VIM will probe for this and ultimately link against the real interpreter, using the system sys.path by default, even though configure will show the virtualenv's path:

% PATH=$HOME/foobar/bin:$PATH ./configure --enable-pythoninterp \
    --with-python-config-dir=$HOME/foobar/lib/python2.6/config \
    --prefix=$HOME/foobar
..
checking for python... /home/pat/foobar/bin/python
checking Python's configuration directory... (cached) /home/pat/foobar/lib/python2.6/config
..

% make install
% $HOME/foobar/bin/vim
:python import sys; print sys.path[:1]
['/usr/lib/python2.6']

The workaround: Since your system vim is most likely compiled against your system python, you don't need to rebuild vim for each virtualenv: you can just drop a shell script named vim in your virtualenv's bin directory, which extends the PYTHONPATH before calling system vim:

Contents of ~/HOME/foobar/bin/vim:

#!/bin/sh
ROOT=`cd \`dirname $0\`; cd ..; pwd`
PYTHONPATH=$ROOT/lib/python2.6/site-packages /usr/bin/vim $*

When that is invoked, the virtualenv's sys.path is inserted:

% $HOME/foobar/bin/vim
:python import sys; print sys.path[:2]
['/home/pat/foobar/lib/python2.6/site-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.6']
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4 Comments

I mentioned that I use multiple versions of Python, though I probably should have elaborated a bit more in the original question. The system Python is not the Python I've created the virtualenvs from. In fact, I have virtualenvs using Python 2.6.2 and Python 2.7.1 but each time I compile vim the python interpreter used is /usr/bin/python (Python 2.6.5 on Ubuntu 10.04)
Where are your other Python versions installed, e.g. where does the symlink /virtualenv/project/lib/python2.6/config point?
It turns out that even though I had my virtualenv activate when calling configure (and therefore echo $PATH would output /virtualenv/project:... when I added PATH=/virtualenv/project:$PATH ... to the start of command, I was able to get it working. Thanks for your help.
Great to hear, glad you're up and running!
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For what it's worth, and no one seems to have answered this here, I had some luck using a command line like the following:

vi_cv_path_python=/usr/bin/python26 ./configure --includedir=/usr/include/python2.6/  --prefix=/home/bcrowder/local --with-features=huge --enable-rubyinterp --enable-pythoninterp --disable-selinux --with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib64/python2.6/config
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2 Comments

This worked for me. I had a locally built python 2.7 prefixed in my $HOME and the vim build seemed to refuse to find it.
where are you suggesting we put this?
6

I would like to give a similar solution to crowder's that works quite well for me.

Imagine you have Python installed in /opt/Python-2.7.5 and that the structure of that folder is

$ tree -d -L 1 /opt/Python-2.7.5/
/opt/Python-2.7.5/
├── bin
├── include
├── lib
└── share

and you would like to build vim with that version of Python. All you need to do is

$ vi_cv_path_python=/opt/Python-2.7.5/bin/python ./configure  --enable-pythoninterp --prefix=/SOME/FOLDER

Thus, just by explicitly giving vi_cv_path_python variable to configure the script will deduce everything on its own (even the config-dir).

This was tested multiple times on vim 7.4+ and lately with vim-7-4-324.

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1 Comment

Thanks. Your response helped me compile vim using a custom/proprietary installation of python.
1

I was having this same issue with 3 different versions of python on my system.

for me the easiest thing was to change my $PATH env variable so that the folder that has the version of python I wanted was (in my case /usr/local/bin) was found before another.

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1 Comment

Setting $PATH alone did not work for me, I had to direct configure explicitly using the vi_cv_path_python invocation I listed in my answer.
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During my compiling vim80, the system python is 2.6, I have another python 2.7 under ~/local/bin, I find that, to make the compiling work:

  1. update $PATH to place my python path ahead
  2. add a soft link, ln -s python python2 ( the configure file would try to locate python config by probing python2 )
  3. make distclean before re-run ./configure to make sure no cached wrong value is picked.
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