Set Up A Virtual Environment

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, so we've got all the tools that we need to start building out our project.
• 00:08 The next thing we need to do is create a virtual environment.
• 00:11 And think of a virtual environment as a walled garden, it's a little space inside
• 00:15 of your computer that's walled off from the rest of your computer.
• 00:19 And inside of our virtual environment, we can create our Django project.
• 00:22 Now, it's a good idea to create sort of a separate area in your computer,
• 00:26 the virtual environment, whenever you create Django projects,
• 00:29 often when you create almost any kind of project and coding.
• 00:32 Because if something goes wrong with your project if something gets out of hand,
• 00:36 the rest of your computer isn't affected.
• 00:38 It also allows us to install different things inside of the virtual environment
• 00:43 that we might not want installed on our computer in general, so for instance,
• 00:48 Django.
• 00:48 Now, you might have ten Django projects, and
• 00:51 they all might require a different version of Django.
• 00:53 If you created a website ten years ago using Django,
• 00:56 that website's going to use a very old version of Django.
• 01:00 So you might not necessarily want to install that old version of Django on your
• 01:04 entire computer, but you would want to install it
• 01:06 inside the virtual environment for that specific project.
• 01:10 So it's a good way to keep things separate.
• 01:12 And it's just sort of best practices when it comes to coding, especially Django.
• 01:16 So that's what we're going to do in this video.
• 01:18 So I've opened up my Git Bash terminal, and the first thing we want to do is
• 01:21 create a directory where we want to put our new Django project.
• 01:24 And to do that we just type in mkdir, stands for make directory,
• 01:29 and we want to put this in our C drive.
• 01:32 And what do we want to call this?
• 01:33 Let's just call this my website.
• 01:35 We're going to build a website.
• 01:36 Let's just call the directory my website.
• 01:38 All right, so now it's been created.
• 01:40 Now we need to move into that directory.
• 01:42 So we type the cd command, stands for change directory,
• 01:47 and then just type in that directory /c/mywebsite.
• 01:51 Hit Enter, and you see right here, now it says we're in that directory.
• 01:55 Or you could type in pwd, and that also shows you what directory you're in.
• 02:00 So if we type in ls to list the stuff in our directory, nothing appears.
• 02:05 And that's because there's nothing in our directory yet.
• 02:07 So I'm going to type clear to clear the screen.
• 02:10 So let's go ahead and create our virtual environment.
• 02:13 And to do that, we just type in python -m and then we want to create
• 02:17 a virtual environment, a venv, stands for virtual environment.
• 02:22 And now we just need to name the virtual environment.
• 02:24 What do we want to call this thing?
• 02:26 Well, I'm just going to call it virtual.
• 02:29 And it takes a second, and then it's done.
• 02:32 So now, if we type in ls to list the stuff in this directory,
• 02:37 we see there's this virtual folder.
• 02:40 So that means our virtual environment has been created successfully.
• 02:43 So we've created it, now we need to turn it on.
• 02:46 And you'll need to do this every time you work with your Django Project.
• 02:49 Anytime you want to do anything at all, you want to come in here,
• 02:53 moving to your c/mywebsite directory and then turn on your virtual environment.
• 02:59 So, to turn it on we type in source and then the directory we just created,
• 03:06 that's virtual/ and then Scripts and then activate.
• 03:11 So source virtual, virtual is just the name of our virtual environment.
• 03:17 And then inside of there, there's a Scripts directory and an activate file.
• 03:21 So we do that and then boom, we see this virtual in parentheses appears.
• 03:25 So now if I hit Enter a bunch of times, every time I do,
• 03:29 this virtual appears above the command prompt, all right?
• 03:33 If we clear the screen, again, it appears.
• 03:36 So that tells us that our virtual environment has been turned on, right?
• 03:40 So that's how you do it for Windows.
• 03:42 If you're on a Mac and you're using something other than the Git Bash
• 03:45 terminal, Mac and Linux computers come with their own terminal.
• 03:48 So you don't necessarily have to use this one,
• 03:51 you still can because there's a Mac version of the Git Bash terminal, and
• 03:54 I suggest you do so that you can follow along and use the same commands that I do.
• 03:58 But if you're using the terminal that came with your Mac or Linux,
• 04:03 then the command to turn on your virtual environment is source bin/activate.
• 04:09 For Windows users, you just use the command that I did just a second ago.
• 04:14 Mac users, you'll use that source bin/activate.
• 04:16 Now, to turn off your virtual environment, you can just go ahead and
• 04:19 close your Git Bash terminal.
• 04:21 That will turn it off, or you can type in deactivate.
• 04:27 And when you do, you'll notice this virtual in parenthesis has disappeared.
• 04:31 If I hit Enter a bunch of times, it doesn't appear above it anywhere,
• 04:35 all right?
• 04:36 So then to turn it back on again, we just type source virtual/Scripts/activate.
• 04:42 And I've just pressed the up arrow key on my keyboard
• 04:45 to cycle through the most recent commands.
• 04:48 So you can do that, it's kind of a shortcut.
• 04:50 And when you do boom, now that virtual appears right there and we're good to go.
• 04:56 So that's all there is to virtual environment.
• 04:58 In the next video, we'll actually install and start using Django.

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