python.exe file not found; creating “virtual environment”

Question

Aim: Build projectoxford into raspberrypi3 - https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/jsturtevant/Setting-up-Project-Oxford-for-Python-on-Windows

At 2:11 of the video, for windows, the command used to create the virtual environment is:

c:\Python3.5\python.exe -m venv env

However, I could not find the python.exe file in raspbian??? No idea this is why; I can only find the python3.5 file with alot of other files. A quick search for python.exe in python3.5 of my raspberry pi3 does not give any results.

A search online have given this solution for Mac:

$ python3.5 -m venv .env

Qn: Can I use this command in replace of c:\Python3.5\python.exe -m venv env ? Would they both give the same results? If not, what should I use instead?

Latest addition: Running the following command give the error:

pi@raspberrypi:~/happy-image-tester-django $ source env/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
from: can't read /var/mail/pip
bash: env/bin/pip: line 10: syntax error near unexpected token `('
bash: env/bin/pip: line 10: `    sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw?|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])'

Django module unfound:

pi@raspberrypi:~/happy-image-tester-django $ source env/bin/activate
(env) pi@raspberrypi:~/happy-image-tester-django $ python manage.py runserver
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "manage.py", line 16, in <module>
    from django.core.management import execute_from_command_line
ImportError: No module named 'django'

(env) pi@raspberrypi:~/happy-image-tester-django $ python -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()"
  File "<string>", line 1
    from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print get_python_lib()
                                                                       ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Answer 1

That video is for installing on Windows. Windows uses .exe files as executables; other operating systems don't. Unix-like systems such as Linux and macOS don't generally use extensions in the same way as Windows does to indicate file type, and usually an executable has no extension at all in a Unix-like systems. The history of that is quite complex, but you can read a little more about the differences here.

You should also notice that c:\Python3.5 doesn't exist on your Pi, because that's a Windows path. Once again, different OS, different rules. Probably most important for you when you follow along is that Linux systems use / rather than \ as a separator.

None of the above really matters though, because all that command wants you to do is run Python. As you've correctly identified, you can just run python3.5 to run it on your system.

As I mention above, it looks like you'll just need to do minor adjustments to the commands in the video to get it working on Linux. Since you want to run:

python3.5 -m venv .env

The directory it'll create will be called .env, not env (so replace all instances of env with .env in the steps). On Linux, you'll need to use / as the path separator instead of \. You'll also need to use source .env/bin/activate, not env\Scripts\activate.bat (that's noted in the documentation for venv).