There are various tools for creating virtual env and I settled down with poetry.

What’s great with poetry is that I can manage dependencies of development and serving. Dependencies of ‘dev’ can be specified using -G.

poetry add <name>         # Packages for serving
poetry add <name> -G dev  # Packages for development, e.g., ruff

For installing packages for serving, exclude a group as:

poetry install --no-root --without dev

Poetry creates pyproject.toml to list the packages I added. When install, Poetry adds dependencies of dependencies (like ones that’s necessary to install, say, polars) in poetry.lock.

I can install the exactly same dependencies when on other machines as ‘poetry install’ uses lock file.

I use poetry up plugin for updating all packages, and it works smoothly. I can replicate the update pakcage on a remote machine by removing .venv and then reinstalling packages using the lock.