Environment Setup

Platform Setup

macOS

If you haven't already installed Homebrew (the brew command), go ahead and do that now: https://brew.sh/

Linux

If you follow these instructions, check in with the TAs to let us know if they do/don't work!

I'm going to give instructions for Ubuntu 16.06.

First update your package repository:

$ apt-get update

Then install a few packages:

$ apt-get install -y git zsh make build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev xz-utils tk-dev tree jq

You should be good to go! Skip ahead to the Python installation instructions below.

Windows

If you follow these instructions, check in with the TAs to let us know if they do/don't work!

If you are on Windows 10 and you don't already have the Linux subsystem installed on your computer, go ahead and follow the instructions here: Install the Windows Subsystem for Linux

If you are not on Windows 10, you are going to want to just use Vagrant. There are some instructions here, from a previous offering of CMSC389L that used Vagrant.

Once you have the Ubuntu app installed, you'll likely need to create a new non-root user that you will login as. Check out these instructions.

From here, you can just follow the Linux instructions above.

Python

We will use pyenv to manage various versions of Python installed locally. For example, macOS comes with a pre-installed (usually outdated) version of Python. We'll be using Python 3.6.2.

First, install pyenv:

$ curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pyenv/pyenv-installer/master/bin/pyenv-installer | bash

Next, add the following lines to your ~/.bashrc:

If you use Terminal.app on macOS: Edit ~/.bash_profile instead as Terminal opens a login shell for every new terminal window. Though you should consider just moving over to iTerm2.

export PATH="$HOME/.pyenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"
eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"

Then, load those changes from your .bashrc and verify that pyenv is functioning:

$ source ~/.bashrc
$ pyenv versions

Now, go ahead and install Python:

$ pyenv install 3.6.2
$ pyenv global 3.6.2

You can check that this worked by running:

$ python --version

Note that whenever you run Python, it will now use this version as the default. However, you can also set a directory-local version using the pyenv local <python version> command.

Pip

You will also be using pipenv to manage pip packages.

If you are on macOS, run the following:

$ brew install pipenv

Otherwise, run the following:

$ pip install pipenv

To verify the installation, run:

$ pipenv --version

Usage

pipenv introduces a Pipfile. It's a deterministic version of requirement.txt.

Most codelabs will ship with a Pipfile. You can install the specified packages via:

$ pipenv install

This creates a local environment for you with all of the packages you need already installed.

To access this environment, run:

$ pipenv shell

That's it!

If you want to install other packages (like python-magic), just run:

$ pipenv install python-magic

Why pipenv? (Optional Background)

Normally in Python, you use a requirements.txt file to track your project's dependencies. (An example from aws-cli) You would run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all dependencies. Easy enough.

However, this doesn't work well when you have multiple Python projects on your system. Some of those packages may collide: for example, possibly you want version 1.4.3 of package-a for Project 1, but version 1.5.0 for Project 2. You'd have to pick!

Other package managers solve this by storing your dependencies in the same directory as your project. For example, Node's package manager, npm, uses a node_modules folder and your packages are accessed from that. Therefore, every package can have its own versions of packages.

In Python, the alternative is to use virtualenv. This does something similar to npm in that it creates a local environment for every Python project. Once you "activate" that local environment, you can then install your Python packages normally.

This separates global state from local state and is quite important in setting up a good development environment.

However, managing virtualenv can be a pain. It's easy to accidentally forget to activate your environment and accidentally install all of your packages into your global Python environment (not great).

Thus, pipenv. Among other features, it manages a virtualenv environment for each pipenv shell, and locks down the set of dependencies required for that environment.

AWS

You will also need to set up the AWS CLI. To install the CLI:

$ pip install awscli
$ aws --version

Now, set up your default region and your AWS credentials by running:

$ aws configure

AWS Warnings

In the previous offering of this class, we had a few students accidentally commit their AWS credentials to a public GitHub. A variety of automatic scrapers by malicious folks are out there constantly checking GitHub for slip-ups like this.

So be careful about what you commit!!

Previous groups had hackers rack up $10k+ charges on their account (thankfully AWS support covered these charges for them).

If you make this mistake (it happens), change your access credentials and revert the commits. You can temporarily make that repo private in the meantime while you fix the git history.

Docker

Install the Docker Community Edition for your OS here: https://store.docker.com/search?offering=community&type=edition

note: certain adblockers, like ublock, may prevent you from seeing the downloadable versions. You can also find the community edition here

Double-check that it installed properly with docker version.

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