Virtual Environments and Packages

What You’ll Learn

You’ll learn how to use pip to install third-party packages and how to isolate your projects using Virtual Environments.

Using pip

pip is the package installer for Python. It allows you to download libraries built by other developers from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

For example, to install the popular requests library for making HTTP requests, run this in your terminal:

pip install requests

Then, use it in your code:

import requests
response = requests.get("https://api.github.com")
print(response.status_code)

What is a Virtual Environment?

Imagine you have App A that needs version 1.0 of a library, and App B that needs version 2.0. If you install everything globally, the versions will conflict.

A Virtual Environment (venv) solves this by creating an isolated folder for each project where its specific dependencies live.

Creating and Activating a venv

In your terminal, navigate to your project folder:

# Create the environment (creates a folder called 'venv')
python -m venv venv

# Activate it (Windows)
venv\Scripts\activate

# Activate it (Mac/Linux)
source venv/bin/activate

Once activated, any pip install command will only install into this specific project folder!