Dumb Question: Where Does ActiveState download projects to?

State Tool
1

Hey I know this is a pretty basic question. But can anyone provide me with some context on how these virtual runtime environments work?

I was under the impression that after creating a “project” via the activeState website and then downloading the said project (and all the packages associated with that project) via the poweshell command would download the project to the respective directory you were in when entering the commands.

Example: let’s say I’m in the follow directory: ~/mpelletier/activestate/

When I run the command to download a python build it creates a folder:

~/mpelletier/activestate/Python-3.9.7-Mac

In that folder there is nothing… I thought all of the libraries and packages were being downloaded there…. Where are they? Does this have to do with the concept of a virtual environment? Am I missing something here? I’m very confused and have to demo this to some engineers tm.

-Matt

2

Hi @mpelletier

The directory you are referring to is your project directory, this is where the state tool will place the activestate.yaml file. It uses this file to source your project information as well as to allow you to customize how your project works.

When you “activate” your project (eg. by running state activate) it will download your runtime files to a local cache directory and sets up your current environment to work with those runtime files. You can find out the location of those files by running eg. which python3, but for the most part you shouldn’t need to care about this.

The idea is that you concern yourself with your code whilst we concern ourselves with setting up runtime dependencies that your code might need.

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