A typical guide to use virtual environment for your python projects.

Virtual Environment is used to create isolated python environment. In simple terms it creates a virtual installation of Python and Pip into some directory. It is separated from your original python installation.

Why we need virtual environments?

Suppose you are working on some project and that project required more than 2 libraries that are dependent on each other. Generally these libraries are open sourced projects and maintained by different developers community. Now, if any one library gets changed in newer version and it is not backwards compatible and if you accidentally update that library from your global python installation then it might break your project.That's why it is safe to use virtual environments.

To create virtual environment in your machine please follow these steps:

Make sure you have installed python in your computer.In this guide I will assume you have installed python 3.(make sure to check add to path)
Install virtual env via this command

$ pip install virtualenv

Then create your virtual environment with following command

$ virtualenv myproject

To activate your virtual environment go to myproject directory and type this.
for windows terminal

$ cd myproject & scripts\activate

$ source myproject/bin/activate

This will create your virtual environment named 'myproject' and then you can install your required modules using pip without affecting your original python environment.

Comments

Python 2 vs Python 3 Pystone benchmarking test!

When Python 3 came out, It was slower than Python 2. As Python's official blog says Python 3 is 10% slower than Python 2. So it means Python 2 is faster than python 3 by some margin. In this Benchmarking, we will use Pystone benchmarks to compare Python 2 and Python 3. My system specification is listed below: CPU = Intel core i3 2100 @ 3.10 GHZ GPU = Nvidia Geforce 210 RAM = 2 GB OS = Windows 10 Pro The benchmarking results may vary upon your system specification. Here's the result. python 3 pystone benchmarks python 2 pystone benchmarks As you can see python 2 has 24% higher benchmarks than python 3 which is pretty impressive. Maybe this is one of the reasons that some programmers prefers to use Python 2 instead of Python 3. Hope this helps :)

How to use pip for Python 3 alongside Python 2?

pip is a package management system used to install and manage software packages written in Python .You can find many third party packages on Python Package Index(PyPI). There are currently 94060 packages here.You can browse all of the packages at the following link PyPI packages So to use pip for Python 3 alongside Python 2, Follow this steps: Step 1: First of all, you have to install both python versions.If you haven't installed it already you can see my other post how to install python 2 and python 3 on Windows PC. Make sure to check Add python 3.5 to path while installing Python 3. Step 2: After installation, you have to setup your path for pip (for Python 2) in your windows PC. To do that first of all copy the following path C:\Python27\Scripts ...

Getting error while installing Scipy using pip3 for 64 bit version of Python ? Here's the solution!

As you know Scipy is one of the most used modules by the Python programmers for Data science and Machine Learning. So if you have ever try to install Scipy using pip3 (3 for Python 3!), you will get an error like this. As you can see, to install Scipy , simple pip3 install scipy will not work. To install Scipy, you have to go to Unofficial Windows Binaries for Python Extension Packages link. Then you have to find for Scipy. If you are using Chrome, you can use cntrl + F to search for scipy. I m using python 3.5 (64-bit) so I have downloaded this package. Make sure to install numpy before scipy otherwise this method wont work. To install numpy, simple pip3 install numpy won't work . You have to download numpy + mkl from the same link and download it, then install it using pip. To install numpy and scipy wheel file you have to use pip install <path of the wheel file> As you can see,pip has...

Learn how to code using Python

Search This Blog