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Preparing Your Environment

Darren Jones
Building Python Project Documentation With MkDocs Darren Jones 03:02
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00:00 Preparing the Environment. Before you start working on your project, you need a virtual environment into which you can install the packages you need. At the end of this step, you’ll have created and activated a virtual environment and installed the necessary dependencies.

00:18 Start by creating a new folder for the project, navigate into the folder, and then create a Python virtual environment.

00:35 At this point, the command you use to activate the virtual environment will depend on the operating system you’re using. If you’re on macOS or Linux, then you can see the command on-screen (source venv/vin/activate).

00:52 If you’re on Windows using Windows Terminal, then this is the command that you’ll need (venv\Scripts\activate).

01:02 After this, the commands are the same for all platforms installing MkDocs and other needed packages.

01:37 Note that these installation commands pin the installation to a specific version to ensure compatibility when you follow this course. You can confirm that the installation worked by calling pip list as seen on-screen.

01:55 The command will give you a list of all installed packages alongside their versions. Confirm that the necessary packages have been installed. You should see four packages that are directly related to your installation command: mkdocs, mkdocs-material, mkdocstrings, and mkdocstrings-python.

02:17 The package called mkdocstrings-python is the Python handler for mkdocstrings that allows mkdocstrings to parse Python code. You installed it by adding the extension [python] when installing the mkdocstrings package with pip.

02:33 You’ll see some additional packages in your list, which shows that the virtual environment and the three installed packages come with additional dependencies that pip installed for you automatically.

02:45 This course has been created using Python 3.10 and mkdocs 1.3.0. Now that you have the environment correctly set up, in the next section of the course, you’ll create the sample Python package that the documentation will be created for.

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