Setting up the development environment

In this post I will describe setting up a development environment on a Mac machine. If you are following along and are using Windows I will indicate any differences to the procedure.

1. Creating a Directory
2. Creating a Virtual Environment
3. Add some Python Packages to the Python Virtual Environment
4. Open Project in VS Code
5. Initialise Git

Creating a Directory

I suggest you allocate yourself a directory somewhere on your computer (Mac, Windows, Linux) and then create a sub-directory within for each project your embark on.

To prevent problems with some packages, I suggest you avoid directory names containing spaces.

On my Mac I have a directory on my desktop called Python and within that I have created a sub-directory called commodities.

(base) peter@Peters-MacBook-Pro-3 commodities % pwd
/Users/peter/Desktop/Python/commodities
(base) peter@Peters-MacBook-Pro-3 commodities % 

(base) peter@Peters-MacBook-Pro-3 commodities % pwd
/Users/peter/Desktop/Python/commodities
(base) peter@Peters-MacBook-Pro-3 commodities % 

Creating a Virtual Environment

I will be using the ta-lib package which sometimes won’t install in pip created virtual environments so I am going to use conda to create my environment instead.

Add some Python Packages

Ta-Lib

(commodities) peter@Peters-MacBook-Pro-3 commodities % conda install conda-forge::ta-lib

(commodities) peter@Peters-MacBook-Pro-3 commodities % conda install conda-forge::ta-lib