William E. Hart's Blog

Working with and developing Python software is complicated by several factors: Many users do not have the administrative privileges that are needed to install packages in the Python site packages directory, where Python packages are most easily installed Python developers often need to manage many Python projects in the same development environment The Python virtualenv package resolves these issues by allowing users to generate a local Python installation. Thus, a user can create a Python installation into which they can install Python packages using standard tools like easy_install and pip. Unfortunately, getting started with virtualenv is complicated by the fact that you need to install this package to create virtual Python installations. But, if you do not have administrative privileges, then you are stuck. This is the simplest process that I have seen: hg clone http://bitbucket.org/ianb/virtualenv virtualenv/virtualenv.py ENV Unfortunately, the hg command may not be

I almost gave the following presentation at the INFORMS Annual Meeting: Installing Python Software Packages: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly That is, I was scheduled to give this talk but my session co-organizer ran over and I had to summarize these slides in 5 minutes! Anyway, these slides describe different strategies for installing Python software.  Although I am a big fan of Python software development, robust strategies for software installation remains a challenge.  This talk describes several different installation scenarios: The Good: the user has administrative privileges Installing on Windows with an installer executable Installing with Linux application utility Installing a Python package from the PyPI repository Installing a Python package from source The Bad: the user does not have administrative privileges Using a virtual environment to isolate package installations Using an installer executable on Windows with a virtual environment The Ugly: the user need