My collection of tips, snippets and scripts in Python (2.7 and 3.X)

• My Visual Studio Code settings

If you have both Python 2.7.X and 3.X installed, you might want to create a shortcut to start a custom cmd.exe (Command Line Prompt) that only has Python 2.7 (or 3.X, depending on your needs) in it's path and that way, you don't risk starting the incorrect python-version while you're working on this!

The example below expects having the following tools at the specified directories:

• Python 2.7: c:\python27\
• GIT: C:\Program Files\Git\cmd
• FFmpeg: C:\Program Files\FFmpeg\bin

cmd /k "set PATH=C:\python27\;C:\python27\Scripts\;C:\Program Files\Git\cmd;C:\Program Files\FFmpeg\bin;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\"

This is a must to know about to ensure that all different Python-projects don't end up installing dependencies that breaks other packages.

Since Python 3.6, Python comes with a lightweight alternative for Virtual Environments called venv
venv — Creation of virtual environments

python3 -m venv .venv

A more functionrich alternative to the builtin venv is virtualenv
To read more details about it, check out Virtualenv docs

After starting cmd.exe using our shortcut we created above, we need to install virtualenv so we can create our virtual environments so we don't end up with mismatching/conflicting versions of python-libraries for different projects.

pip install virtualenv

Then, let's move to our root project-directory where you

cd "X:\MY_WORKING_FOLDER\HERE"

And now we can create our virtual environment:

virtualenv env

When it's done, run this command to put your cmd-window in your new python virtual environment:

env\Scripts\activate.bat

And now we can install any libraries we want for our project using pip, like this:

pip install git+https://github.com/mapillary/Piexif

When you're done working in your virtualenv and want to switch to another one, run this:

deactivate