python-venv.md

Creating a Python Virtual Environment

Bellow are the instructions that are enough get you up and running :) You can also follow this guide for a more in depth set of instructions that accomplish exactly the same thing.

⚠️ You should always be using a virtual environment to install python packages. ⚠️ Otherwise you can overwrite packages in your system Python installation and break things.

You will need a virtual environment for each specialization (S01 - S06). We will use the venv package to create the virtual environment and pip (the reference Python package manager) to install and update packages.

Step 1 Start by ensuring pip, setuptools, and wheel are up to date:

python3.12 -m pip install --user --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

If you get an error at this point, run the following command, then repeat the line above.

python3.12 -m ensurepip --upgrade

Step 2 Create a virtual environment with the name s01 for the specialization S01:

python3.12 -m venv ~/.virtualenvs/s01

Step 3 Activate the environment

source ~/.virtualenvs/s01/bin/activate

Note: after you activate your virtual environment you should see the name of your virtual environment surrounded by parenthesis at the beginning of your command line, like this:

mig@my-machine % source ~/.virtualenvs/s01/bin/activate
(s01) mig@my-machine %

Now if you use the which command it should output the location of your virtual environment's Python installation:

(s01) mig@my-machine % which python
/Users/mig/.virtualenvs/s01/bin/python

Step 4 Now update pip.

(s01) pip install -U pip

And you're done!