Virtual environments¶

Virtual environments are a way to isolate your project from the rest of your system. This is important because it allows you to install packages that are specific to your project, without affecting the rest of your system.

Creating an environment¶

There are several ways to create virtual environments. The most popular (and recommended) is with Anaconda. After installing Anaconda or Miniconda (light version), you create a new environment like so:

# create new environment, press enter to accept
# -- important to set python version, otherwise `python` executable may not exist
# -- (would be `python3` instead)
conda create -n project_env python=3.11

# view available environments
conda info --envs

# activate environment
conda activate project_env

# deactivate environment
(project_env) conda deactivate

For machines really light on memory (e.g. Raspberry Pi), you can use Virtualenv:

# install library if not already
pip install virtualenv

# create virtual environment (creates folder called project_env)
python3 -m venv project_env

# activate virtual environment
source project_env/bin/activate

# deactivate virtual environment
(project_env) deactivate

Note that when the virtual environment is activated, it will typically appear in parenthesis in the command line.

In this project we recommend using Poetry, and while Poetry creates a virtual environment per project (as described here), I typically stick to using one of the above methods for creating virtual environments (e.g. to use conda, to share environments with other projects, to use in notebooks). You can identify the location and info of the Poetry virtual environment by running:

poetry env info

You can also configure to create the virtual environment within the project folder:

poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true

Virtual environments¶

Creating an environment¶

Sharing your environment¶