📝 Picking a code editor

In this class, we recommend using VSCode as your code editor. If you want to use a different editor, that's totally fine, but we may not be able to help you with specific issues you run into. Another popular editor that is specific to Python is PyCharm.

💻 Development

Pyenv

Pyenv is a great tool that allows us to manage multiple Python versions on our device. This is sometimes necessary since different projects might be on different versions.

If you have brew, you can installpyenv with the following command:

brew update
brew install pyenv

If you don't have brew, you should get it 🙃... It's a fairly popular package manager for macOS and Linux systems!

If you choose not to get brew, or you're on Windows, you can also use the automatic installer script provided by pyenv:

curl https://pyenv.run | bash

You'll also want to set up your shell environment for Pyenv, which you can do by adding the following to your shell profile (.bashrc, .zshrc, etc.):

For .bashrc:

echo 'export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

For .zshrc:

echo 'export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo '[[ -d $PYENV_ROOT/bin ]] && export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo 'eval "$(pyenv init -)"' >> ~/.zshrc

After you've added this to your shell profile, you'll need to reload your shell profile by running source ~/.bashrc or source ~/.zshrc.

Note that these instructions are from a section on the pyenv README, and they have more information on setting up pyenv for different shells, including if you would like to add these commands to your shell profile automatically.

Poetry

In this class, we will be using poetry as our package manager. It's much younger than pip, which is the default package manager for Python, but it's much more powerful, and in my opinion, much easier to use.

To install poetry, you can use the following command:

curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -

In this class, all the assignments will have a pyproject.toml file that will specify the dependencies for the project. You can install these dependencies by running poetry install in the directory where the pyproject.toml file is located. During the assignment, you might want to use more dependencies than originally specified, and you can do that by running poetry add <package-name>.

During these assignments, you should also run poetry shell to activate the virtual environment that poetry creates for you. This will allow you to run the scripts you write in the assignment.

Venv (optional information)

This will not be used in this class, but it's good to know about since it's fairly popular still. It's a module provided by Python that enables virtual environment creation. The main commands to know are:

# create the env
python3 -m venv {whatever_you_want_to_name_your_env}

# activate the env (similar to poetry shell)
source {whatever_you_want_to_name_your_env}/bin/activate

# once you're done with the env
deactivate

Note that there are SOOOOO many other ways to manage virtual environments including Pipenv, conda, and more. We're just going to be using poetry in this class, but most of the other options are also quite similar.