Mastering Python for Finance - Second Edition

Preparing a virtual environment

At this point, it is advisable to set up a Python virtual environment. Virtual environments allow you to manage separate package installations that you need for a particular project, isolating the packages installed in other environments.

To install the virtual environment package in your terminal window, type the following:

$ pip install virtualenv

On some systems, Python 3 may use a different pip executable and may need to be installed via an alternate pip command; for example: $ pip3 install virtualenv.

To create a virtual environment, go to your project's directory and run virtualenv. For example, if the name of your project folder is my_project_folder, type the following:

$ cd my_project_folder$ virtualenv ...