Best way to avoid stale pyc files

Question

How do I avoid stale *.pyc files? Sometimes, especially when switching branches in version control, some *.pyc files are left there which are later used by Python instead of the source files.

What's the best way to make sure that I don't create or unknowingly use any stale *.pyc files?

Answer 1

There is a useful environment variable for that: PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE

export PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=true