The python environment setup cheatsheet

Python seems to have a million different options to set up an environment. So I did what any good developer does: I asked Claude. Here's the checklist I used.

Setup

Prerequisite: you'll want to have python3 installed on your machine.

1. Create a virtual environment in your current directory with python3 -m venv .venv. .venv/ will be a generated folder, so add this to your .gitignore.
2. Activate the environment with source .venv/bin/activate. Run this every time you open your project directory from your editor, or when you open a new terminal instance.
3. List all dependencies in a requirements.txt file.
4. Install dependencies with pip install -r requirements.txt. Run this again whenever you add a new dependency to your requirements.txt.
5. Run your scripts with python3 name.py.

Editor tooling

VS Code seems to generate helpful prompts when creating a new environment to set up editor tooling.

Outside of VS Code, I would install the pyright LSP. You can install this into neovim environments, or use the built-in pyright LSP when using Zed (my editor of choice).

To tell pyright where your python env is located, add a pyrightconfig.json with a path to your project directory (. for the current directory) and the name of your venv folder (.venv):

{
  "venvPath": ".",
  "venv": ".venv"
}