Setup

Anaconda 3¶

Anaconda is a tool that simplifies Python package management and deployment. In this course, we will be using Anaconda 3 as our all-in one system setup for local Python development.

Install Anaconda 3¶

Go to Anaconda’s website, scroll down to the bottom, and download and run the installer for your operating system. Once installed, open the Anaconda Navigator application and you should see the home screen:

Python Environment¶

Python environments are self-contained Python installations meant to limit version conflicts and dependencies between different Python projects. It is fairly common to create a new environment whenever you work on a different project. As a result, we’ll create an environment specific for this course.

1. Download our 160environment.yaml file, which specifies all requisite Python packages (and their respective versions) we’ll be using in this course.
2. Navigate to the Environments section of Anaconda Navigator, click Import at the bottom
3. Click on the folder icon next to “Local drive” and select the 160environment.yaml file from your downloads folder (or wherever you downloaded that file to).
4. Replace the text in the “New environment name” with “cse160”.
5. Click import.

Visual Studio Code¶

Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is a popular text editor that many developers use for a number of different programming languages. While Python can be programmed in various different tools, we will be using VSCode as our main development tool in this course.

Download VSCode¶

1. Download and install VSCode according to your computer’s operating system.

2. Once the home screen has loaded, install Python and flake8 plugins by clicking on the Extensions icon (a collection of 4 squares) on the left navigation pane, and installing the Python plugin and flake8 plugins by Microsoft.

Setting Up VSCode¶

1. Download test.py and open it in VSCode: File | Open and select test.py.
2. Navigate to the Command Pallet from Help | Show All Commands, type in Python: Select Interpreter and hit Enter.
3. Select the cse160 Anaconda environment we created earlier, which should have a path similar to anaconda3/envs/cse160.

Sanity Checking VSCode Setup¶

You can check that everything is set up correctly by test.py by clicking the Run button in the upper right-hand corner.

If everything runs correctly you should see the following output in the terminal at the bottom:

Main runs
Foo runs
Bar runs

You should see a number of red squiggly lines in VSCode (warnings from flake8, the plugin we installed earlier which checks python files for style conventions) since test.py has some things that break style conventions in Python (unused import statement and semicolons). You may ignore these for now, but for future homework assignments, you will be expected to fix all flake8 errors.