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Setting up your computer (Python)

Setting up your computer (Python)

Owned by Erick Peirson (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Feb 11, 2016 by y (Unlicensed)

This page describes all of the software that you will need to install and configure for this course.

Stuff to Install

  1. Anaconda Python 2.7.x. https://www.continuum.io/downloads. It is very important that you install Python 2.7, and NOT Python 3.x. Anaconda provides its own pre-compiled Python, as well as hundreds of pre-compiled utilities and packages for scientific computing. Although it is possible to use your system's Python, or the vanilla binaries from python.org, we highly recommend using Anaconda instead. Anaconda is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
  2. Atom. https://atom.io/. Atom is a fantastic text editor that plays well with Python. This is as close as we get to an IDE. (smile)
  3. Atom-pair. https://atom.io/packages/atom-pair. We'll use atom-pair for pair programming exercises later in the course. 

  4. virtualenvwrapper. virtualenvwrapper provides a convenient mechanism for managing Python virtual environments. Although virtualenv is not recommended for use with Anaconda (it bundles with its own virtual environment manager, conda), it will work just fine for the purposes of this course.

    Install virtualenvwrapper
    $ pip install virtualenvwrapper

    The following should be added to your shell initialization script. Usually, this is ~/.bash_profile (where ~ is your home directory, e.g. ``/Users/johndoe``). See this page for more information.

    Add this to your shell initialization script
    export WORKON_HOME=$HOME/.virtualenvs
export PROJECT_HOME=$HOME/
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

    Windows users: try this package: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenvwrapper-win

    If everything goes well, you should be able to create and activate virtual environments like this:

    Create a virtual environment
    $ mkvirtualenv myenv
New python executable in myenv/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.
(myenv) $

    Now you can pip install packages into this virtual environment like you would do for your system. 

  5. Vogon Web!https://github.com/diging/vogon-web. 

    1. First, git clone the repository:

      Clone vogon-web
      $ git clone https://github.com/diging/vogon-web
Cloning into 'vogon-web'...
remote: Counting objects: 12164, done.
remote: Total 12164 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 12163
Receiving objects: 100% (12164/12164), 57.44 MiB | 7.29 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (3711/3711), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Checking out files: 100% (12286/12286), done.

    2. Create a new virtual environment for this project:

      Create a virtual environment
      $ mkvirtualenv vogonweb
New python executable in vogonweb/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.

    3. Install dependencies with pip:

      Clone vogon-web
      (vogonweb) $ cd vogon-web
(vogonweb) $ pip install -r requirements.txt

      This will download and install a whole bunch of Python packages. There are likely to be missing libraries, and other dependencies. Please install these as necessary. E.g. Ubuntu users should use apt-get to install missing libraries. Mac users: install homebrew, and use brew to install missing. libraries. Windows users: good luck..... let us know if you run into problems.
      Note for Mac Users: If you are getting "Error : pg_config executable not found" when running "pip install -r requirements.txt", run "brew install postgresql" and then run the command again.

       

       

    4. Ensure that you can run the application! The following commands should be sufficient to start the web app:

      Clone vogon-web
      (vogonweb) $ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='vogon.local_settings'
(vogonweb) $ export REDIS_URL=''
(vogonweb) $ python manage.py migrate  # You only need to run this once.
(vogonweb) $ python manage.py runserver
Performing system checks...

System check identified 1 issue (0 silenced).
January 15, 2016 - 12:25:07
Django version 1.8.2, using settings 'vogon.local_settings'
Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
Quit the server with CONTROL-C.

      Point your web server to: 

      http://127.0.0.1:8000/

      You should see something like this: 

  6. redis. http://redis.io/. Ubuntu users, do sudo apt-get install redis-server.  Mac users, brew install redis. Windows users: redis doesn't officially run on Windows, but you might be able to get this to work: https://github.com/MSOpenTech/redis

 

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