by Josh Redmond
2. Setting up
After this lesson, you will be able to:
- Set up a Python environment to complete the rest of the course and create a web app
- Understand how to create Python environments in Anaconda and customise them for specific uses
In this course, we will take a guided project-based approacht to build a web-app which models urban heat in Leeds, and lets users explore future scenarios. I have already curated and set up all the data, functions, and code needed to handle the modelling of heat and creating results. This course will teach you how to take those functions, code, and models, and turn them into an app which lets uers interact with parameters and explore results.
In this lesson, we will set up our Python environment so that we can use all the tools and functions necessary for the rest of the project.
If you have already set up an environment using conda, venv, or other tools then you can skip this section.
If not, we are going to create a Python environment to do our work in. Environments have several advantages over simply working with a single Python installation.
First, if you need to, navigate to and download the Anaconda installer, available here.
Screenshot of the Anaconda Distribution download page showing bullet pointed features of the software and two buttons in a horizontal row at the bottom labelled 'Code in the Cloud' and 'Download' respectively.
Click the 'Download' button on the web page and select the correct version for your operating system.
Install Anaconda. Once this process is completed, create a new environment for this course, call it something like "geospatialWebApps" or whatever you like.
Then, download the data for the course - it will contain a file called requirements.txt. Unzip the folder and place it somewhere convenient as it contains necessary data and code for the course.
In anaconda navigator, open a terminal in your geospatialWebApps environment, and run the following:
cd path/to/your/data/folder
pip install -r requirements.txt
Once this is complete - your environment is ready, and you can begin with the next lesson.