What is the purpose of a virtual environment in Python?

A virtual environment in Python is used to isolate project dependencies. It allows creating a separate space with its own installed packages and library versions, without affecting the system's global settings and other projects. This is especially important when different projects require different versions of the same libraries.

Example of creating and activating a virtual environment:

python -m venv myenv
source myenv/bin/activate  # Linux/macOS
myenv\Scripts\activate    # Windows

After activation, you can install packages via pip, and they will only be available within this environment.