For the initial installation instructions see Part I, Part II and Part III.
Installing pip
We can install a pip via the command line by using the curl command, which downloads the pip installation perl script.
curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
Once it is downloaded, we need to execute it in the command prompt with the Python interpreter.
python get-pip.py
If the above command fails on a Mac and Linux distribution due to permission issues (most likely because Python does not have permission to update certain directories on the file system. These directories are read-only by default to ensure that random scripts cannot mess with important files and infect the system with viruses), we may need to run following command.
sudo python get-pip.py
Syntax to install a Python package
In this section of ‘how to install Python packages’, we will understand how to use the following syntax to install a package using ‘pip’.
`!pip install package_name`
For example, to install the Backtrader package you have to replace the ‘package_name’ with ‘backtrader’.
# Install a Python package
!pip install backtrader
After installation, you can see a success message in the last line. This means the package can now be imported and used in your code. There are a number of institutions along with individuals who use different versions of Python itself, so it goes without saying that there might be versions of packages too. Let’s find about package versions in the next section of the tutorial on ‘how to install Python packages’.
Stay tuned for the next installment, in which the author will discuss submitting versions of packages.
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