How to delete a venv or virtualenv on Mac

What is inside a venv

A virtual environment is a folder with a link to Python and every package you installed into it. With machine learning libraries one environment easily takes a few gigabytes. Your code is not in it, so deleting it loses nothing you can’t install again.

Save the list of packages first

If the project has a requirements.txt, a pyproject.toml or a lock file such as uv.lock or poetry.lock, the environment can be made again from it. If it has none, activate the environment in the project folder:

Then save the list of installed packages and their versions to requirements.txt:

How to delete a venv

1. If the environment is active in Terminal, type deactivate and press Return. Quit your code editor if it uses this environment.
2. In Finder, open the project folder. .venv is hidden: press Shift-Command-. (period) to show hidden files.

3. Move the .venv or venv folder to the Trash, then empty the Trash.

Or in Terminal, in the project folder. This command deletes the .venv folder with every package in it, for good. Your code and the requirements file stay:

Environments kept outside projects usually live in ~/.virtualenvs, a folder each: delete the folder of the one you no longer need. Conda environments are not venvs: remove them with conda’s own commands.

How to create the venv again

In the project folder, create a new environment:

Activate it with source .venv/bin/activate and install the packages from the requirements file:

For a project described by pyproject.toml, run python3 -m pip install --editable . instead. In a uv project, uv sync creates .venv and installs everything from uv.lock.

pip takes packages from its cache when it can, so this is faster than the first install. If you also cleared the pip cache, everything is downloaded again.