Setting up a Development Environment

So, I’ve heard lots about development environments, and how important they are, but it’s not something that I’ve ever had the chance to experiment with. That changes this week, when I finally determined how I wanted to put my new Python skills to the test. Basically, I wanted to follow some tutorials to create some kind of Python web application. It looked like that was going to include Flask and SQLite. I found an interesting idea at Digital Ocean here: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-make-a-web-application-using-flask-in-python-3

The first step here was setting up a environment. I followed the instructions on the Digital Ocean site above. This was an interesting approach as it required Xcode:

Xcode-select -p

It was also necessary to set up the Xcode Command Line Tools:

Xcode-select —install

The next step was to install Homebrew – as a package manager. Now, I was a bit wary about this as I’ve had a few issues with this in the past, and mucked around with permissions. Nevertheless, confident that I had my Mac backed up, I proceeded. See the homebrew page. I then edited the bash profile:

nano ~/.bash_profile

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

I can test that homebrew is successfully installed: brew doctor

And update it with: brew update

The next step involved using Homebrew to set up Python3

brew install python3

The next step was to create a virtual environment. Each environment is basically a folder in the computer with a few scripts in it.

mkdir Environments

cd Environments

python3.7 -m venv my_env

This creates a new direction – my_env with a few items inside it. Probably the most important is the bin which contains the activate script to start the environment.

source my_env/bin/activate

And to deactivate:

Deactivate