I never really needed to look for another language to learn once I was acquinted with ruby some years back. I love it, and I really do. It provides clean code which does what it reads – it feels like the language was written for me, which was infact the idea behind ruby – a language made for developers.

But, anyways, I am giving Python another try for with hopes that it will be fruitful for me to learn the language. It has been, I think, 2-3 years since I last tried the language for some time, briefly. I have learned a lot in that duration in the Ruby world. And, I am hoping, if nothing else, this attempt at Python will make me a better rubyist. This post describes my notes on setting up a development environment for Python on OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion), and some initial learning intakes.

Installation

I preferred not to use the Python distribution that comes with OSX for my dev needs, which most Pythonista will agree with. The reason is simple – I do not want the system based Python to get corrupted while my dev percussions, and is the same reason why I use rbenv for Ruby development.

So, I looked at some tutorials regarding this, and found that the good old homebrew that I love has again come up with a rescue. Moreover, it provides me with pip and setuptools, which is really great.

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# Installs Python 2.x
brew install python --with-brewed-openssl
# Links some of the Python Dev. utilities to /Applications directory.
brew linkapps

Alright, so next we need a version control system, for which mercurial is happily recommended in many tutorials, but I love my VCS and I am not going to part away from it – I am loyal to it – Git.

Finally, lets install virtualenv which creates virtual isolated environments for our Python projects, kinda like rvm in Ruby world.

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pip install virtualenv
pip install virtualenvwrapper

Next, I do not want to run pip command against the system python and overwrite or update a needed library. So, I will tell pip to only instally anything, if we are in a virtualenv based environment. Add the following two lines to your ~/.bashrc, or zsh configuration file (or, whatever else you use):

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if [[ -s /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh ]]; then
    source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh
fi

# pip should only run if there is a virtualenv currently activated
export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true
# cache pip-installed packages to avoid re-downloading
export PIP_DOWNLOAD_CACHE=$HOME/.pip/cache
# virtualenv wrapper support
export WORKON_HOME=~/Code/python/VirtualEnvs
# make pip use the virtualenv dir
export PIP_VIRTUALENV_BASE=$WORKON_HOME

Now, trying to install a package without a valid virtualenv will give an error that says:

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~ ➲ pip install markdown
Could not find an activated virtualenv (required).

If you want to use pip for the system based Python, you can add a function like this in your bash/zsh configuration file:

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syspip(){
   PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV="" pip "$@"
}

Create a new virtualenv, using:

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virtualenv test_project
cd test_project
. bin/activate

The Editor

Although, there is a really good PyCharm editor available for Python, I will still try and stay with my editor of choice: Vim, which is really magnificient. However, in the upcoming days, I can install and add various python based features for my vim editor.

Epilogue

I have decided to write a separate blog post on what I find inside Python. Will soon write up about it.