Development environment setup

As we dive into the various recipes provided in this book, you will be creating different Python virtual environments to install all your dependencies without impacting other Python projects.

You can think of a virtual environment as isolated buckets or folders, each with a Python interpreter and associated libraries. The following diagram illustrates the concept behind isolated, self-contained virtual environments, each with a different Python interpreter and different versions of packages and libraries installed:

Figure 1.1: An example of three different Python virtual environments, one for each Python project

If you installed Anaconda then these environments are typically stored and contained in separate folders inside the envs subfolder within the main Anaconda (or Miniconda) folder installation. As an example, on macOS, you can find the envs folder under Users/<yourusername>/opt/anaconda3/envs/. On Windows OS, it may look more like C:\Users\...