What Python installation/platform?

[SJaffa]

Last time we used a VM with Python already installed but this might not be an option in the future?

Decisions to make:

• Do we (a) get everyone to install it on their own machines or (b) provide a platform with it preinstalled?
• If (a), what installation method, works for all OSs, need extra pre-workshop setup session, extra helpers to start
• If (b), what service, who/how hosting, who pays?

[SJaffa]

@douglowe what solution did we use on the course in the end and was it suitable? Is that what we want to go with long term?

[douglowe]

We used the VM that we have used for the last 3-4 years.

We should investigate the jupyter lab servers more over the next 2 months, and see if they are suitable though. It might be nice for us to use a central solution instead.

[SJaffa]

Current solution: ITS-owned Jupyter Hub located at https://jupyter.its.manchester.ac.uk/

We requested an increase in memory allocation per user which should allow people to run the conda installations, it might be slow if they all do it at once but we will see on the day.

We need to give them get them to download the data and upload it to the jupyter hub, adn test if we can create and use environments in the jupyter notebook.

[SJaffa]

In the terminal in Jupyter hub:

listing and creating conda environments works, but before acivating you need to do conda init bash. This advises you to close the terminal and open it which loses the bashrc, so instead you can keep the terminal open and run source ~/.bashrc to initialise conda, then activate it

• How do we get the notebook to use the environment?

[SJaffa]

Could run scripts form the terminal with conda run -n py38 python my_script.py (source)

[SJaffa]

All the libraries we use in the course are preinstalled in the Jupyter Hub (I did Ctrl-f "import" and checked they all run), so we don't need to get the environment working for the notebook, it just seems a bit disjointed to teach them and then never use it...

[douglowe]

I agree it is now disjointed - the central team were a bit too helpful in installing all the libraries we needed for this course.

Ideally we'll split out the packaging episode into a dedicated packaging lesson at some point. For now perhaps you could simply move this lesson to the end of the day, so that it doesn't disrupt the flow of the rest of the episodes.