After create and activate your virtualenv :
virtualenv --no-site-packages env source env/bin/activate pip install [your libs]
You have to defined the PYTHONPATH environnement variable to your QGIS's python installation path.
please change [qgispath] to your qgis's path :
export PYTHONPATH=/[qgispath]/share/qgis/python
it will also be necessary to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/[qgispath]/lib
to prevent this error
>>> import qgis.core ImportError: libqgis_core.so.1.5.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Your pythonpath is set only for the virtualenv, and for your session. If you want to set it automatically under this virtualenv, you can create a file under env/lib/python2.7/site-packages with a .pth file.
The most convenient way is to add a path configuration file to a directory that’s already on Python’s path, usually to the .../site-packages/ directory. Path configuration files have an extension of .pth, and each line must contain a single path that will be appended to sys.path. (Because the new paths are appended to sys.path, modules in the added directories will not override standard modules. This means you can’t use this mechanism for installing fixed versions of standard modules.) source
to create and populate the file use a command like that :
cat > [yourVirtualEnv]/lib/python2.7/site-packages/qgispythonpath.pth << /[qgispath]/share/qgis/python
Found in Python Qgis cookbook, and a related answer set pythonpath
