How to leave a virtual environment in Python? Code Example

In order to leave a virtual environment you can close the shell terminal or command prompt. That will end the session.

But Python also provides deactivate command which is used to terminate or leave a virtual environment and switch back to the system installed version of Python.

Suppose you are into a virtual environment. We can check it using echo $VIRTUAL_ENV –

(env1)$ echo $VIRTUAL_ENV
/Users/akash/virtualenvwrapper/tmp/env1   # 👈 Output

Now to return back to system environment, we can use deactivate –

(env1)$ deactivate

Now run echo $VIRTUAL_ENV again to check if we are still into a virtual environment. If the output is empty then we are not in any virtual environment.

$ echo $VIRTUAL_ENV

$

If you are using anaconda, then use either of these commands –

(env1)$ conda deactivate

# ☝️ OR 👇

(env1)$ source deactivate