Posts

Setting up a virtual environment in Python

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In this post, we are going to set up a virtual environment in Python and as an example install Django 1.8.18 (LTS). Although you can set up a virtual environment in any distribution of Python, in this post we are going to use WinPython, a portable version of python that you can run from a USB drive on any Windows machine. No installation or special permissions are required! If you already have a Python distribution installed that you want to use, you can skip to step 2  and just install virtualenv . 1. Install WinPython Download your choice of WinPython from sourceforge.net. Here I chose WinPython-64bit-3.6.2.0Qt5.exe . Run the exe file and you will have a folder as shown in the image below. During the installation, or rather unpacking of the files, you must choose a destination folder. Here I chose to unpack the files to a folder called WinPython-64bit-3.6.2.0Qt5 that is located in the root of my drive, in my case d:\ WinPython-64bit-3.6.2.0Qt5 \ . Although the folder

WinPython - Portable Python that you can run from a usb drive on any Windows machine

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In this post, I will show you how to run Python from a USB flash drive on any Windows machine using WinPython. If you have any previous experience with Python, either from data manipulation or maybe from some of the Python classes offered by Coursera , then you will be happy to know that WinPython by default includes: Pandas - Python Data Analysis Library: SciPy - An ecosystem of open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering Spyder   - An interactive development environment scikit-learn - Machine Learning Additional packages can often be relatively easy installed. After you installed WinPython you will have a directory on your flash drive, or on your hard drive, that looks like in the image to the left. Jupyter Notebook is included, together with the IDLEX development environment. You can also run Python from the console, i.e. command prompt, directly from your USB flash drive, on any Windows machine.                 Installati