Setting up a Virtual Environment

Quick reference

• 00:04 Okay, in this video we want to set up a virtual environment.
• 00:07 And the virtual environment is sort of a little walled garden inside of your
• 00:11 computer.
• 00:12 It's an area that's sort of set aside from the rest of your computer.
• 00:15 And inside that virtual environment,
• 00:17 we can do all kinds of cool things, we can install different software.
• 00:20 And we can run all kinds of different programs and
• 00:23 it's separate from the rest of our computer.
• 00:25 So if we do something horribly wrong inside the virtual environment,
• 00:28 the rest of the computer's not messed up.
• 00:30 It also allows us to install different versions of things
• 00:34 inside the virtual environment that may be different than
• 00:37 the same thing we might have installed somewhere else on our computer.
• 00:40 So it's just a best practices when it comes to most coding things, and
• 00:45 data analysis is no different.
• 00:46 So first things first,
• 00:48 we need to create a separate directory where we're going to hold all the files
• 00:52 that we're going to be working with throughout the rest of the course.
• 00:55 And we can do that by using the make directory command.
• 00:57 That's just mkdir, and now we want to put this in our C drive, and
• 01:01 let's call this data, let's create a folder called data.
• 01:05 Now, if you're on a Mac or Linux, obviously, you don't have a C drive,
• 01:09 you can just save this to your desktop or anywhere else on your computer.
• 01:13 So now, we need to move into that directory, change directory,
• 01:16 the cd command, and then just type c, and then data.
• 01:20 Now, we can see we're in that directory, or we can type the pwd command to see,
• 01:24 yep, sure enough, there we are in that directory.
• 01:27 We can type the ls command to list the stuff in this directory and
• 01:30 there's nothing listed in there now which we would expect because
• 01:33 we just created this directory.
• 01:35 So I'm going to go ahead and clear this screen, so
• 01:37 let's create our virtual environment.
• 01:38 We have to start by kind of installing it.
• 01:40 And to do that, we type in python -m and then venv, stands for virtual environment.
• 01:46 And now, we want to name this, I'm just going to name ours virtual,
• 01:50 you can name it, anything you want, but it's a virtual environment, so
• 01:52 it kind of makes sense to me to name it virtual.
• 01:55 And it takes a couple of seconds for this to spin up, but it looks like it's done.
• 01:58 Now, we can type the ls command again.
• 02:01 And now, we see there's this virtual directory and
• 02:03 inside of there is all of our virtual environment files.
• 02:06 So we've installed it, now we need to turn it on.
• 02:09 And to do that, we type in source virtual/Scripts with capital S, /activate.
• 02:17 And you'll notice now above our command prompt, we have this little virtual thing,
• 02:22 which means our virtual environment has been turned on.
• 02:24 Now, if you're on Mac or
• 02:25 Linux, the command to turn on your virtual environment is source bin/activate,
• 02:30 slightly different than source virtual scripts activate but sort of the same.
• 02:36 So okay, we've included a screen now and
• 02:38 our virtual environment is still on, we can turn off our virtual environment
• 02:41 anytime we want just by typing in deactivate.
• 02:44 And then you'll notice that little thing above the command prompt where it says
• 02:48 virtual and parentheses is no longer there.
• 02:50 So that's how we know it's been turned off.
• 02:52 So all right, I'm going to go ahead and turn this back on.
• 02:55 And to do that, I can type in that command again,
• 02:57 or I could just type the up arrow key a couple of times on my keyboard
• 03:01 to sort of cycle through the latest commands that I typed in.
• 03:04 And we can see here's that command that turn on our virtual environment, so
• 03:07 I can do that.
• 03:09 And the virtual thing pops back up so
• 03:12 that I know that my virtual environment has been turned on.
• 03:15 So for the rest of the course and for the rest of your life, anytime you want to use
• 03:19 this virtual environment, anytime you want to do data analysis with the tools
• 03:24 that we're going to be using throughout this course, you're going to want to
• 03:27 come to your c/data directory and turn on your virtual environment.
• 03:31 Nothing will really work until that happens,
• 03:33 so you don't always have to be in this c/data directory.
• 03:39 If you created a different project later on and you name it something else and
• 03:43 you put it in the c/JohnElder directory, whatever, then you would obviously
• 03:47 go to that directory from then on and turn on a virtual environment there.
• 03:51 But for us for the rest of this course, we're going to be working in this data
• 03:54 directory inside of this virtual environment, so that's all for this video.
• 03:58 In the next video, we'll go ahead and install Jupyter notebooks and start to
• 04:01 play around with it a little bit, and that'll be coming up in the next video.

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