Basic python setup

This page may be very obvious for some, but very useful for others. We provide a set of instructions to set up python in a way that makes sense for developing plugins (or other projects). The following explanation is just one way to do it, and there are many ways, which may be better based on your specific needs and preferences

Let’s start by downloading python and a package manager. Even if you already have python installed on your system, this is still a good idea. Download and install miniconda, a small version of Anaconda, a package manager for python.

Now that we have conda set up, we can create an environment. An environment allows us to isolate all the dependencies for a project. We can activate the environment when we are working on the project, and switch to another environment when we are working on a another project. Lets create an environment called my_env.

conda create --name my_env --python=3.8

Now, we can activate the environment using

conda activate my_env

We can deactivate using

conda deactivate

If we now run pip install <sompackage> with the environment activated, and it will be installed in the environment

Notebooks

Many data science projects use notebooks for exploration, a basic setup for notebooks is

pip install jupyter

Also, to be able to select your environment from a notebook

conda install nb_conda_kernels