Documentation regarding VIRTUAL_ENV behaviour

[aucampia]

As far as I can tell, setting the VIRTUAL_ENV environment variable controls where poetry installs to, however I can't find any documentation about this, is there any, and should there not be some?

[neersighted]

This is not Poetry-specific behavior, setting VIRTUAL_ENV is how virtual environments work. This is technically implementation-defined and not part of PEP 405, but it is well-established and stable behavior.

The only 'magic' occurring with this variable is that Poetry will opt out of its own minimal virtual environment management when it is set.

[chriscarrollsmith]

If you are seeing warning: VIRTUAL_ENV=/some_path/does not match the project environment path.venv and will be ignored, it means that poetry has detected an in-project virtual environment but has a different one activated in the current shell. To resolve this conflict, you can:

1. Deactivate and remove the poetry-managed environment altogether by typing poetry env remove, or
2. Remove the in-project virtual environment by deleting the .venv folder