Beginner struggles...bear with me

Ripred · February 20

Hi y'all, to start with if you're easily triggered by painfully noob questions, best to avoid this so I understand the basic concept I'm more interested in your approaches, best practices of when to choose one over the other, also I'm unaware if this is a feature of all other languages but this thought came up in my study of python,..my question is about virtual environments vs system wide environment, I'm currently still learning so forgive my ignorance for the moment, now I understand the basic concept between the two, and some of the ups and downs of each as far as version control, compatibility,so on, I'm more interested ATM of what approach do more experienced take, do you jump right into virtual environment for new projects, or start with system wide, is it purely dependent on the type of project, what type of project would you say best suits each, would you take the same approach on similar projects between personal and professional coding? sorry if this is frustratingly noob but I haven't been coding for very long and recently ran into a small snag, during my study and practice I've just been creating new files in the same project, and I was recently following along with instructions from a book which first asks you to create a new project file, and almost immediately knew I've been overlooking an important detail the second after I typed out my import statement....

dcgreen2k · February 20

I always use virtual environments for Python projects. It's really just a question of whether you want to install libraries for your current project only or for the entire system.

In my experience, they're most useful for managing different versions of libraries. For example, I recently started working on a project that required an older version of a library that I was already using for some other programs. Instead of installing the older version system-wide and potentially having version conflicts, you can just install it in a virtual environment for the one project. In cases like this, the developers will include a requirements.txt file which contains a list of libraries to use and their version numbers. This makes it super easy to get a new virtual environment up and running with just a few commands.

adm0n · February 20

I also second always using a virtual environment for every project! You save yourself a lot of hassle that way.

If you don't want to use venv for it, I really liked using anaconda. It is able to even install non python dependencies that are needed for packages.

But using them or not, is more of a efficiency thing. If you continue to just do everything system wide, you will eventually run into a very annoying problem. And figure out, that it would be easier to just setup virtual environments for each of your projects after the fact, compared to trying to fix it system wide. So ... no matter how much you avoid virtual environments, they will almost surely find you and force you to use them.