Virtual ENV

"WELL THIS IS SIMPLY A SELF-CONTAINED LOCATION THAT ENABLES YOU TO MAINTAIN SEPARATE AND ISOLATED ENVIRONMENTS FOR YOUR PYTHON PROJECTS.

ADVANTAGES

• MANAGE DEPENDENCIES
• VERSIONS
• PACKAGES *WITHOUT CONFLICTS ACCROSS DIFFERENT PROJECTS

When developing software with Python, a basic approach is to install Python on your machine, install all your required libraries via the terminal, write all your code in a single .py file or notebook, and run your Python program in the terminal.

This is a common approach for a lot of beginners and many people transitioning from working with Python for data analytics.

This works fine for simple Python scripting projects. But in complex software development projects, like building a Python library, an API, or software development kit, often you will be working with multiple files, multiple packages, and dependencies. As a result, you will need to isolate your Python development environment for that particular project.

Consider this scenario: you are working on app A, using your system installed Python and you pip install packageX version 1.0 to your global Python library. Then you switch to project B on your local machine, and you install the same packageX but version 2.0, which has some breaking changes between version 1.0 and 2.0.

When you go back to run your app A, you get all sorts of errors, and your app does not run. This is a scenario you can run into when building software with Python. And to get around this, we can use virtual environments.

referance to use ENV

pip install langchain_core langchain_anthropic

Creating a venv

Mac

env is the virtual env name

python3 -m venv <name of env>

Windows

python -m venv env

To activate

Mac

source env/bin/activate

Windows

env is the virtual env name

.env/Scripts/activate
{/* Or the below */}
.env/Scripts/activate.bat

see if activated

if you see this the it's activated

(env) PS F:\code\AI\genai course> 
 ^

Deactivate

$ deactivate

Now if you have to share this, Then

pip freeze > requirements.txt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y21OR1OPC9A&ab_channel=TechWithTim