Installing Python
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In this video, we’re going to go through the process of installing Python on Windows and configuring it to work with our CC 410 projects. To begin, I’ve downloaded the latest Python installer from the Python website, and I’m going to run that installer to install Python on Windows. In the Python installer, there are a couple of options that are not checked by default that we absolutely want to make sure we check. First, I’m going to check mark the option at the bottom that says Add Python 3.10 to PATH, which allows me to use Python in tools such as PowerShell, as well as additional IDEs. I’m also going to click the Customize Installation option to change a few of the other options. The first page I’m going to leave everything is the default. And then on the second page, I’m going to check mark the option that says install for all users. That will place Python in the C:\Program Files\Python folder instead of buried somewhere else. With that, I’ll click install and it will install Python. Once Python is installed, we’ll click Close to close the installer. We don’t need to disable the path length limit for most of our projects, but this is something you could do if you find you run into trouble later on.
To test Python on Windows, I’m going to open PowerShell. In PowerShell, we can type the command python followed by --version to see the version of Python that’s installed. Notice that on Windows, it uses the python command instead of python3. If you’ve installed it the way I’ve shown, the python3 command will instead send you to the Windows Store to install an older version of Python. We don’t want to do this. It’s unfortunate that this is how Python handles Python version three versus the Python command itself. But it’s something to be aware of. So on Windows, we always want to use the Python command if we if we’ve installed Python following the method I’ve shown here.
So now I’m going to open up my project that I downloaded from Git, and I should be able to run it. However, Python has one unique thing that we should talk about, which is the idea of environments. In Python, when we install all of our Python libraries, by default, they’ll get installed for the user across all of our Python projects. This can be a problem if we want to have multiple projects on our system, and so it’s considered a best practice to create a virtual environment in Python, and use that when we run our code. So to create a virtual environment in Python, I’m going to run the python command -venv for virtual environment. And then the argument that you give after that is the location to store your virtual environments. By convention, we typically use the folder name .venv, to store our virtual environment. So at this command, Python will create a new virtual environment for us containing all of the Python executables, and this will be a place where we can install all of our Python libraries just for this project. It’s also really nice because both the PyCharm and Visual Studio Code are able to detect this folder and — and automatically use that virtual environment for us. Once the virtual environment is created, we need to actually activate it in our terminal session in order to use it. In PowerShell, we will run the command .venv/Scripts/activate.ps1. When we try to run this script, however, PowerShell says that scripts are disabled on our system.
So we need to first allow scripts in order to be able to use this virtual environment. To do that, we’re going to open another PowerShell window, but this time we’re going to run it as Administrator. In the administrator PowerShell, we’re going to type the command Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted. By setting the execution policy to unrestricted, it will allow us to run scripts directly on the system. When we do this, it will pop up a message and we will type Y to say yes, we would like to turn this off. Once we’ve done that, we can close PowerShell and we can close and reopen our basic PowerShell window to actually see the change.
To load our virtual environment, we will change directory into the project folder where the venv is located. I can confirm that we see that folder using ls, and then we can activate the environment by using .venv/Scripts/activate.ps1. If we did this correctly, we should sound now see the name of our virtual environment, the .venv folder here at the beginning of our PowerShell terminal. It’s really important to always make sure we see this before we try and run any Python commands for this project. Later on when we work with our IDEs, we’ll see how they do this automatically.
At this point, we now have our virtual environment. So we can now run our project. The first step is to install all of our requirements. So we’ll do pip install -r requirements.txt. Once we’ve done that, we can run our project just like normal by doing python -m src to load the src module. There we go.
We have to do one additional step in order to be able to run tox. The tox configuration file we’ve been using is not configured properly for Windows. So I’ve opened the project here in Windows Explorer, and I’m going to edit the tox file. I’m just going to use Notepad for this, and we’re going to make two changes. First, we’re using Python 3.10, so we need to change our environment to use Python 3.10. And then in all of these commands, right now we’re using python3, and we’ll need to change these to python. Now bear in mind that both of these changes will mean that the project won’t work in its current form on Codio. So you may wish to create multiple tox.ini files and switch between the two or do something similar in order to keep track. One other change we’ll need to make to our tox configuration file on Windows is to specify the specific folders we want flake to check. By default, flake will try and check everything on our system, and that can take a long time. So here I’m going to put src and test at the end of the flake command in our tox configuration file. So that only checks these two folders within our project for style violations. So once I’ve made those changes, I will save the file in Notepad using File > Save, and then I’ll close that and go back to PowerShell.
With those changes made, the tox I should be able to run our tox plan using tox -r and see everything run. You’ll only need to use tox -r the first time to recreate your environment. Afterwards, just like on Codio, you can use tox to reuse an existing environment, which will make this command run much faster.
There we go. We’ve successfully set up Python on our computer so that we can run Python directly and we can use tox to test our files. At this point, we have everything we need in our virtual environment to run our project. And we can use any text editor we want to edit the source code. One thing we may wish to do is add a few additional items to our Git ignore file so that they won’t get committed to Git. You’ll notice that PyCharm creates a folder as well as the virtual environment. So let’s open up our Git ignore file and quickly add those two items to it. We can simply list any folder names we want to exclude in our Git ignore file. And then the next time we commit this to Git we won’t have those files included.
In future videos, I’m going to show you how to install the PyCharm and Visual Studio Code IDEs to work with this project.