Mac Os X Virtualenv Python 32/64Bit

I’ve been using virutalenv for a long time now for development purposes and it works extremely well.

Although lately I have run into some issues with trying to work with trying to run python as 32bit in one environment and 64bit in another. I must say it is all completely crazy trying to keep this all together, especially when you need to have other applications running at a specific architecture as well.

I had MySQL installed at 64bit with MySQL-python and all was working well with the virtualenv that had python at 64bit. But now I had to change python to 32bit, and that required me to “downgrade” MySQL to 32bit instead.

On a Mac (10.6) it is simple enough to switch between 32 and 64it and visa versa with the following commands

For 64bit
defaults write com.apple.versioner.python Prefer-32-Bit -bool no


For 32bit
defaults write com.apple.versioner.python Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes

But sadly those do not affect the virtualenv, in order to modify the virtualenv python you need to do the following;

$ lipo -info /Users/cogg/.virtualenvs/tweakeats/bin/python
Architectures in the fat file: /Users/cogg/.virtualenvs/tweakeats/bin/python are: x86_64 i386 ppc7400
$ mv /Users/cogg/.virtualenvs/tweakeats/bin/python /Users/cogg/.virtualenvs/tweakeats/bin/python.old
$ lipo -remove x86_64 /Users/cogg/.virtualenvs/tweakeats/bin/python.old -output /Users/cogg/.virtualenvs/tweakeats/bin/python
$ python
[...]
>>> import sys
>>> sys.maxint
2147483647

That was found on stackoverflow