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Table of Contents

Python

In this guide, I expect you are using Python3 (and pip3), but (for old projects) you can use Python2 (and pip2) as well.

Virtual environments

You can use virtual environments, e.g. one for each project (or a group of projects), so the version requirements of different projects do not collide.

Create a new virtual environment with

  python3 -m venv my-project-name

where my-project-name can be a relative or absolute path to a directory which will be created.
You can use any Python version for the new environment, e.g. /opt/python/3.5.4/bin/python3 -m venv my-project-name-python3.5
Then activate it with

  source my-project-name/bin/activate

Now your prompt changes and you can install any modules (with pip3, but you can omit --user), e.g.

  pip3 install --upgrade pip tensorflow

If you run python, it will be the version used when creating venv. Check it with

  which python
  python -V

Once finished, exit the virtual environment with

  deactivate

If you decide you don't need the environment anymore and any modules installed in this environment, simply delete the my-project-name directory.

Note that there are many alternative ways how to create virtual environments and install modules. The venv module is available only for Python 3.3 and newer. For older versions you can use the third-party virtualenv tool:

 pip3 install --user --upgrade pip
 pip3 install --user virtualenv
 virtualenv my-project-name
 source my-project-name/bin/activate

Installing directly from Git

If you are developing (contributing to) a Python tool version in git and want to install the newest version, you can use 'pip3 git+https://github.com/, provided the project has proper setup.py in the root directory.
You can also
git clone the project manually and add the path to your $PYTHONPATH. This way whenever you git pull, you should make sure there are no new dependencies, e.g. with pip3 install –user -r requirements.txt if the project provides the requirements.txt'' file.
See Udapi or Neural Monkey for examples of both ways.


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