Virtual environments

To manage the installation of CARTOframes and the other associated Python 3 modules, we will be using the virtual environments package virtualenv. This Python module makes it easy to set up completely separate Python installations on the same computer. Using virtualenv, a copy of Python is created, and when activated, all modules that are installed are separate from the main Python installation (in other words, the modules installed inside a virtual environment will not be added to the main site-packages folder). This allows for a lot less package management headaches.

Installing virtualenv

Installation of the virtualenv package is easy when using pip from PyPI (pypi.org):

pip install virtualenv

This command will add virtualenv and its supporting modules. Make sure that the main Python installation has been added to the path Windows environment variables so that virtualenv can be called from the command line.

Running virtualenv

To create the virtual environment, open a command...