Python Environment Configuration#

In this section, we provide the minimal Python packages required to complete the programming exercises in this course. We are saying minimal because for some of the project work, you may need extra packages

Python Installation#

We will be using Python 3.12 for this course. Please refer to the installation options below.

Python IDE#

An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a software application that provides programmers with tools for software development, such as a source code editor, compiler, build automation, and debugging tools. Popular Python IDEs include Jupyter Notebook, VS Code, and PyCharm.

Jupyter Notebook and Google Colab#

After installing Python, you can proceed to install Jupyter Notebook, the default IDE for data science and scientific computing. Jupyter Notebook allows you to write code and include documentation with Markdown. If you installed Python via the Anaconda distribution, Jupyter Notebook and other commonly used Python packages come pre-installed, saving you additional setup steps.

In addition to the local Jupyter Notebook installation with Anaconda, you can also use a similar environment on hosted servers like Google Colab. Google Colab is an online Jupyter Notebook accessible via the cloud, offering free GPUs for working with LLMs and other AI-based Python programs.

Python Environment Setup#

Major Packages#

For the most part, we’ll install packages as needed. However, here’s a list of core packages we’ll require:

1.Transformers

2.Pytorch

3.HuggingFace

4.Langchain

The full list of required packages is provided in the requirements.txt file.

Python Environment Setup#

Create Virtual Environment#

Create a Python virtual environment to use for this project. The Python version used when this was developed was 3.12. The code below creates a virtual environment and also installs all the Python packages we need for this tutorial

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -U pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Setup .env file#

This file is important for keeping your API keys and other secrets

# OpenAI
OPENAI_API_KEY="<Put your token here>"
# Hugging Face
HUGGINGFACEHUB_API_TOKEN="<Put your token here>"

# Twilio Credentials
TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID="<Put your token here>"
TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN="<Put your token here>"
TWILIO_NUMBER="<Put your token here>"

# PostgreSQL connection details
DB_USER = "<Put your token here>"
DB_PASSWORD = "<Put your token here>"