Python Virtual Environments
The Python Packaging User Guide contains step-by-step instructions for creating and using a virtual environment. The steps below are explicit to one way to do so on our server.
Creating a New Virtual Environment
To set up a virtual environment for a project you can navigate to the project folder (for instance Anthony/NewProject/) and activate GitBash. (If using the file explorer, right click and select GitBash Here.) This will open GitBash and you should see the following:
Create a new virtual environment by typing:
This will create a virtual environment in the folder named my_venv; if you would like it named something different, you can change the name of the last argument.
Activating and Adding Packages to the Virtual Environment
Now that a virtual environment has been created, we can activate the virtual environment (named my_venv) with GitBash by typing:
After this is done you will know it's successful because GitBash will indicate the environment being used within ():
Packages can then be installed into this virtual environment with pip, so to install the latest version of numpy we would just type pip3 install numpy. The packages will then be saved to .../my_venv/Lib/site_packages/.
Setting up Jupyter Notebooks
Jupyter notebooks are great for exploratory data analysis or code development. In order to run jupyter notebooks we will need to install ipykernel and pass the virtual environment to the name. This is accomplished with the following two commands:
Then, open a juptyer notebook within GitBash with jupyter notebook. Now when you create a new notebook you will be able to select this virtual environment when starting a new notebook:
Deactivating the virtual environment
Typing deactivate will deactivate the currently activated virtual environment.