Using Virtual Environment

What is a Virtual Environment?

A Virtual Environment is a self contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages. To learn more about Virtual Environments see here.

Why should I use a Virtual Environment?

A Virtual Environment keeps all dependencies for the Python project separate from dependencies of other projects. This has a few advantages:

1. It makes dependency management for the project easy.
2. It enables using and testing of different library versions by quickly spinning up a new environment and verifying the compatibility of the code with the different version.

Python Version Requirement (Required)

This guide has been tested with Python 3.10.12. Newer versions might not have support for the dependent libraries, so are not recommended.

Use Conda (or Mamba)

While there are many options for setting up virtual environments for python, by far the most common and simpler approach is by using Anaconda (aka Conda). You can read the documentation on how to get started with Conda here.

Installing Pip (Required)

1. Download the get-pip.py file using the command curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
2. Run the following python3 get-pip.py
3. Check pip version using pip3 -V

Note (for Ubuntu users): If the ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util' error is encountered, then python3-distutils needs to be installed. Install python3-distutils using sudo apt-get install python3-distutils

Mac OS X Setup

1. Create a folder where the virtual environments will reside $ mkdir ~/python-envs
2. To create a new environment named sample-env execute $ python3 -m venv ~/python-envs/sample-env
3. To activate the environment execute $ source ~/python-envs/sample-env/bin/activate
4. Upgrade to the latest pip version using $ pip3 install --upgrade pip
5. Upgrade to the latest setuptools version using $ pip3 install --upgrade setuptools
6. To deactivate the environment execute $ deactivate (you can reactivate the environment using the same activate command listed above)

Ubuntu Setup

1. Install the python3-venv package using $ sudo apt-get install python3-venv
2. Follow the steps in the Mac OS X installation.

Windows Setup

1. Create a folder where the virtual environments will reside md python-envs
2. To create a new environment named sample-env execute python -m venv python-envs\sample-env
3. To activate the environment execute python-envs\sample-env\Scripts\activate
4. Upgrade to the latest pip version using pip install --upgrade pip
5. To deactivate the environment execute deactivate (you can reactivate the environment using the same activate command listed above)

Note:

• Verify that you are using Python version 3.10.12. Launch a command prompt using cmd and execute python --version to verify the version.
• Python3 installation may require admin privileges on Windows.
• This guide is for Windows 10 using a 64-bit architecture only.