Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps Transcripts
Chapter: App 5: Real-time weather client
Lecture: Virtual environments: A clean slate

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0:00 Before we move on from our weather app
0:02 let's look at one other important concept around PyPi, packaging, pip
0:08 and this whole external package management for Python.
0:12 Remember, we could see what was installed by saying pip 3 list
0:16 and over here we have various things like stripe
0:19 1.28.0 for credit card processing.
0:23 And we have pigments for web apps
0:26 now what do you do when you have
0:29 more than one application you want to run on your machine.
0:32 And they both use stripe but the stripe API had
0:36 a breaking change from 1.26 to 1.28
0:40 and one of the apps is written to use the 2.6 API
0:44 and one of your apps is using the 2.8 API
0:46 what do you do, do you just reinstall and uninstall
0:49 and push the versions backwards and forward
0:52 like how do you deal with that version difference, right
0:54 you can't run both apps on your machine at the same time
0:57 without continuously reconfiguring your machine
1:01 also, if I was going to give my app to somebody deploy to production
1:06 give it to a user maybe runs on their machine
1:09 how would I know what I need?
1:11 In this list, what is in this list is required to run the weather app?
1:15 Well, you and I know because we just wrote it
1:17 we know that requests is needed and up at the top bs4 is needed.
1:22 But, there is nothing here that makes it clear what is needed
1:27 now there is ways to do that and with packaging
1:29 and packaging up your apps in certain ways
1:32 but the environment itself does not help us here
1:34 so we have these two problems
1:36 different apps may use different versions of the same package
1:39 and it's very hard to tell what's needed to run a particular app.
1:42 Another problem is if I want to install something here
1:45 I may need to run this as admin, also not the best.
1:49 So there is a way to solve this problem
1:52 and there is an external package that will solve it for all versions of Python
1:55 there is a built in version in Python 3
1:59 that only works in Python 3 called Venv
2:00 and I'll go and show you the way that works
2:04 uniformly across all the different versions.
2:06 So there is something called virtual env that is built to address this problem,
2:10 let's see how we can use virtual env to create a special dedicated environment
2:14 completely isolated from the general machine
2:16 just for this weather app and its packages.
2:19 I made a folder called Python environments,
2:21 let's go in there and see right now it's empty,
2:24 so I am going to use virtual env to actually create environment,
2:27 so one question you might want to ask is which virtual env do you have.
2:31 We have the one from Python 3 so you want to make sure you run that one,
2:35 in this case we need to type virtual env as a program,
2:37 if you want to run the other one
2:40 you might have to run it as a module and through Python directly
2:42 so it's something like Python 3-env space virtualenv.
2:49 Like so, but we don't have to do this,
2:51 we can just type virtualenv, right,
2:55 so what we are going to do now is we want to tell virtual env go and create
2:58 a clean empty Python environment, Python 3, for us to work with.
3:02 So we'll say virtualenv and then we'll just give it a folder name
3:05 so let's call this weather. py3
3:08 just to make it more obvious this is for the weather app and it's Python 3.
3:13 You can see that it's copy the Python 3 executable over and it's also setup pip
3:17 setup tools and few other things.
3:20 So now if I look there should be this folder, if I type correctly,
3:22 there will be this folder, so we can go in there and look and there is a bin folder
3:26 so let's go into this bin, but before I go into the bin
3:31 let me ask the question which Python 3 would I get if I run it
3:35 and let's ask pip3 list.
3:38 There is all the stuff that's in the main machine, ok,
3:41 so let's look in we go in the bin
3:43 you'll see that there is an activate
3:46 and what we are going to do is we are going to run this activate
3:48 and we want to run it against the current shells, so we'll say
3:50 . to source activated
3:52 this isn't necessary in Windows, the dot, it doesn't work, I don't believe,
3:55 we'll say this now watch the command prompt change
3:58 now you see it says weather 3.
4:00 And if I go somewhere else, you see now I know that I have
4:03 my Python 3 weather environment as the active Python environment
4:07 so if I ask questions like which Python
4:09 oh now all of the sudden I've got the one running out of there
4:12 regardless of where I am and if I say pip list
4:15 well we just have an empty system.
4:18 Now the version that got installed into our little virtual environment is out of date
4:21 let's just not worry about that for now.
4:24 Ok, so we can actually use this to run our app.
4:28 So let's go over to where we wrote our weather app say CD and this,
4:34 if we look in here we can see there is our program, that looks familiar, right,
4:38 this is our little weather app, great,
4:41 but if we try to run it we say Python 3 but we don't need to say Python 3
4:44 now there is only one Python in this virtual environment
4:47 and we give it our program, there is going to be a problem.
4:51 It says, this concept of Requests as a module-
4:54 this doesn't mean anything to me
4:56 there is no module named requests
4:59 because in this environment we have nothing
5:02 we just have this clean environment here
5:04 so let's quickly install what we need, we know that we need
5:06 Requests and we need Beautiful Soup 4.
5:10 We can install them both at the same time like this,
5:14 if we don't forget to put the install command in there.
5:20 Excellent, now if we ask pip list you'll see we have
5:23 Request, Beautiful Soup and nothing else
5:26 I am kind of getting tired of this, so let's just run it
5:28 so we have something nice and clean.
5:31 So now if we list, you can see we just have Beautiful Soup, Request
5:34 and the 3 foundational bits.
5:36 Ok, so again, let's try to run this
5:38 we'll say Python and we'll give it the program
5:41 oh look, it's running, all right, 97201 perfect
5:46 the temperature in Portland, Oregon is 7.4 degrees Celsius
5:49 and it's partly cloudy, how awesome is that,
5:52 so it doesn't matter if somebody else installs
5:55 Requests or Beautiful Soup on this machine
5:57 and they have a different version or they updated
6:00 we are a 100% isolated and just have this working version of Python here
6:05 this clean version of Python 3
6:10 and our own user profile in this folder that we created.
6:14 So the last thing to do is use this, in PyCharm.
6:17 So we are over here in PyCharm
6:20 and if you see when I run it that we are still running out of the main python 3.5
6:24 and when I go to the project interpreter,
6:27 you can see that's one we have selected here
6:30 and we have again all the stuff that we saw in Pip list,
6:32 we can actually go over here and select one
6:35 if I hit show all it lets you have this little management thing
6:37 here is an old one I can clean up, then I can add,
6:40 I can say add local or I could even create
6:43 a virtual environment that a whole process you just saw me do with virtual env
6:47 creating this stuff and all that, just click this button and it will actually do that for you.
6:51 So that's super nice,
6:55 but what I want to do is add the one that we just created.
6:58 So we can just browse over here to our environment,
7:01 and it loads up and we just pick Python,
7:06 perfect so now we have this, we can actually select this
7:09 to be the project interpreter for the current project
7:12 and now look what's in here, you can see it's just that clean environment,
7:15 so let's go over here hit ok, it takes a moment for it to update and index the
7:20 environment, now it's ready to run, now look at this,
7:23 user/screencaster/python_environments/weather_py3bin/python,
7:28 so now we are using again form PyCharm
7:31 that isolated clean environment, very nice,
7:33 and let's just check one final time what the weather is in
7:36 let's say 92118- beautiful, the temperature
7:39 in lovely Coronado California is 15.2 degrees Celsius and mostly cloudy,
7:44 hey, where is the sun San Diego?
7:46 Anyway, this is working using our environments,
7:49 using our packages that we have installed form PyPi using pip
7:52 into that environment- lovely.
7:55 So that brings this application to a close
7:57 I hope you've learned a lot and had a lot of fun doing it,
8:00 we are just going to re-iterate one more time,
8:02 remember, you should try to use APIs and verify
8:06 the usage rights when you are doing screen scraping
8:09 but it is a really cool way to get data into your app.