Selecting which python to use with org-babel

When working with org-babel, it's useful to be able to select from which environment python is run. There's the obvious brute-force approach - activating the appropriate environment before launching emacs - but quitting and restarting emacs is a lot of hassle if you need to change the environment in a running emacs. Besides, I'm a big advocate of launching emacs on startup, and only exiting it when you shutdown your computer. So here, I'll show how to choose the python being run within org-babel.

Identifying the python command to use

We need the full path for the python command inside the conda or other virtual environment. If you already know this, feel free to skip ahead.

In your shell (if you want to do everything in emacs, M-x shell will launch one), activate your environment using the usual instructions. Then run which python, and copy the shown path - we'll need it in the next step.

Setting the org-mode buffer to use the correct python

Now that we have the path to the python executable, we just need to set the org-mode buffer to actually use it. Use M-x add-file-local-variable to set the local varibale org-babel-python-command to the path of the python command (in double quotes) to use. This will insert the definition of the local variable at the end of the buffer. Now save the file, revert the buffer (M-x revert-buffer), and confirm setting the local variable when prompted.

Note that because this is local to a particular org-mode file, different files can run with different pythons. Also, because this approach only relies on the path to the python executable, it's agnostic to whether ytou're using conda, venv or something more exotic.

Test that it works

The following snippet should return the path to your chosen python executable without quotes:

#+BEGIN_SRC python
import sys
return sys.exec_prefix
#+END_SRC

#+RESULTS:
: /Users/hdyson/anaconda3/envs/example

Isn't this just things behaving as described in the docs?

Pretty much - but I can never remember the add-file-local-variable command name, so this post is a note to myself.

emacs  org-mode  conda  virtual environment 

See also