installing kernel from virtualenv (on macos) points to system binary

Hi,

When installing ipykernel kernelspecs from inside virtualenv I’m expecting to have kernelspec.json to point to the binary of the virtualenv, however, I get the system binary.

This happens on macOS with python3 installed via homebrew. python 3.7.1, ipykernel 5.1.0.

Steps to reproduce:

python3 -m venv --system-site-packages ipykerneltest
source ./ipykerneltest/bin/activate
python3 -m ipykernel install --name ipykerneltest --user
head ~/Library/Jupyter/kernels/ipykerneltest/kernel.json

I’m getting:

{
 "argv": [
  "/usr/local/opt/python/bin/python3.7",
...

Am I doing it all wrong, or is it a bug somewhere?

Regards to the team!

[alexgawrilow]

I had the same problem on Ubuntu. After installing the ipykernel inside the virtual environment, the python path was set to the standard python path (/usr/bin/python3). However, when I deactivated the virtual environment and reactivated it and installed another ipykernel in the virtual environment, the python path was set correctly to the path of the virtual environment.

[waiyip-aquabyte]

@alexgawrilow’s workaround does it for me. I have never used the --system-site-packages option.