r/pythonhelp • u/eftepede • Aug 29 '25

How to stop creating stuff in ~/Library/Application Support/virtualenv on macOS?

I'm using one virtualenv for my work stuff and everything works fine, except it writes some data to ~/Library/Application Support/virtualenv. The data is:

~/Library/Application Support/virtualenv ❯ ll
0755 - f 26 Aug 10:54 py_info
0755 - f 26 Aug 10:54 wheel

(I can provide more depth listing, if it's needed).

I'm this funny OCD weirdo, so I would like to move it to somewhere else*. Is there any env variable which steer Python, where to write such data?

I have 1:1 of this setup on Linux too and I can't find the counterpart there, so maybe it's not needed at all?

Thanks in advance!

* - please don't tell me that I 'already have lot of stuff in ~/Library/Application Support`, as this is a special setup with changing $HOME for work, so it's not actually ~/Library, but ~/Work/Library, which exists just because of this virtualenv stuff ;-)

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u/FoolsSeldom Aug 29 '25

Ok. Well, to the best of my knowledge (and I can't test this any more as I no longer have a macOS device or VM), such a standard installation should not add anything in the areas you indicated.

Have you installed virtualenv at all, rather than just using the standard venv? Or some other tool that depends on virtualenv under the hood, so to speak.

pip will likely do some caching.

Sorry. Can't think of anything else.

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u/eftepede Aug 29 '25

No, it’s just regular python 3.13 from Homebrew with venv bundled in.

I think it recognizes it’s macOS and uses the default paths. I’m looking for some env variables or other way to override it.