Python Setup

Great work this morning, y’all. Here’s the instructions for getting Python set up correctly and installing exercism, as well as some helpful notes and links.

Install exercism

Open a terminal and enter the following command verbatim (the && chains commands together, but only if the first one doesn’t fail):

brew update && brew install exercism

Exercism is a great tool we’ll be using for doing warmup and learning exercises.

Install pipenv

Open a terminal and enter the following command verbatim:

brew install pipenv

pipenv is a package management tool that will simplify the task of organizing complex Python projects.

Get to know Python

I’m including a few links to good beginner resources for anyone who’s eager to get started.

• Real Python Python Basics

• Official Python Beginner’s Resources

• Official Python Tutorial

• Python Library & Language Documentation (bookmark this site)

Quick note on Python 2 vs Python 3

There are two major versions of Python in common use – Python 2 and Python 3. Python 2 is no longer updated and support is being withdrawn, but because MacOS uses Python 2 in a few places, Python 2 is the default version. This is annoying and complicates things somewhat, but isn’t too difficult to navigate around – if you’re trying out code you found on the internet, and it says (for example):

python a_python_script.py

you should instead run:

python3 a_python_script.py

There are a couple of other places where you may need to run slightly different commands, but I’ll only go over one of them right now; if you try some of the exercism.io exercises this weekend, it may tell you to run:

pytest hello_world_test.py

Instead, you should run:

python3 -m pytest hello_world_test.py

(of course, hello_world_test.py could be any Python file).