title: Is there a better solution than virtualenv for server side python code?
body: <p>I have been using <a href="http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/dev/virtualenvs/" rel="nofollow">virtualenv</a> and <a href="http://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.org/en/latest/" rel="nofollow">virtual envwrapper</a> for years while doing development.  Until recently, I have been lucky and the systems / servers (*nix) I deployed too have had no other Python applications running so I have never had to worry about conflicting <code>site-packages</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Google searching didn't turn anything up for me, so I was hoping the community could help guide me towards a common approach to managing python dependencies on a deployed system / server.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Clarifications</strong>  </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>It's an important note that the systems I am deploying to are single board computers with limited resources.  This rules out implementations such as using a VM for each application.</li>
  <li>At the time of asking, I cannot fault virtualenv on any fronts (possibly because I haven't tried it on the server yet)</li>
  <li>The applications I am deploying are, for the most part, system processes (web servers, boot loaders, logging utils, etc...).  Because these are run as background services (normally with root access) I do not know how virtualenv will fair.</li>
  <li>I was looking to see if there was a common way to manage python dependencies server side before I attempted to use something that, in my eyes, is geared towards the development side of things.</li>
  </ol>