I have decided to start doing more coding in Python, so I needed to install it. The title says it all but this is just to record what I did. In brief:
- install a package manager (equivalent to apt in linux)
- use python to install pip (a package manager for python)
- install an environment manager so that you can support different sets of dependencies with minimal hassle
I started with the instructions here. They work fairly seemlessly. However, the following is what I did.
Installing Package Manager
You need to do this with administrator privaleges otherwise it won’t work. I used the instructions found here that are for installing where you are behind a proxy.
To launch a command prompt with admin privaleges do Start, then type cmd, right click on the command launcher and choose more, then run as an admin.
Installing Python 3
Again use administrator privaleges to invoke python -m pip install -U pip at the command line.
Pipenv and Virtualenv environment manager
This was a bit fiddly but purely down to the fact that the default install relies only on user privaleges. You end up with an error 'pipenv' is not recognized as an internal or external command because the path is not updated.
Once complete, run py -m site --user-site which reports a directory path. It will be something like C:\Users\mjones\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python36\site-packages. What you need to do is to add a directory to the PATH environment variable that is the same as this user path but ends with Scripts rather than site-packages.
Pipenv manages library dependencies on a per project basis. You use pipenv instead of pip. For example, to install the requests package, change into your project’s directory (or just an empty directory for this tutorial) and run:
cd myproject
pipenv install requests
Pipenv will install the requests library and create a Pipfile for you in your project’s directory. The Pipfile is used to track which dependencies your project needs in case you need to re-install them, such as when you share your project with others. For more info, see here
virtualenv is a tool to create isolated Python environments. virtualenv creates a folder which contains all the necessary executables to use the packages that a Python project would need.