IMPORTANT

Once you have completed the setup, mark yourself as such on this spreadsheet.

If you know what you're doing in terms of python, there's a requirements.txt that you can use as you would like. Alternatively if you like Docker, there's install instructions for it in the wiki. If that's the case the only thing you really need to do is make sure you can run the Verify great success.ipynb notebook in this repo and you are good.

How to use this repo

This repository is the one that you will use to make sure you can execute all of the critical tasks required to make the most of your learning experience. In particular, after following this readme, you should:

1. Have a GitHub acount
2. Be able to clone a git repository
3. Be able to start a jupyter notebook with python 3
4. Run code within a jupyter notebook to (among other things) render some plots.

Prerequisites

Please note that these are conservative estimates. If you are not 100% on any of these (except for the last), you should still be okay.

• ~1GB of free memory on your computer
• Some hundreds of megabytes free on your computer
• 64-bit processor
• The ability to read a README and follow the instructions in it

Setup

GitHub account

Sign up for a GitHub account if you don't already have one. Really, it's quite useful.

Step 1 - Install dependencies

Follow each of the links to download and install.

• git
  • If you're on Windows or OS X and don't know what git is, GitHub Desktop is probably easiest.
• anaconda
  • If you are on windows:
    • Make sure that there are no non-english characters in your username or on the path and that you have qt installed. Here is a reference on how to address these issues.

Step 2 - Clone an LDSSA repo

In the future, you will clone other repositories so take note of these steps, you will indeed use them again. If you don't already know where you will want to clone the repo to on your machine, create a directory in your user's home directory called "repos" and clone everything to that.

Using GitHub Desktop

From the green "Clone or Download" button on the github.com repo page, select "clone using github desktop" as shown below:

From the command line the easy way

git clone https://github.com/LDSSA/setup.git

From the command line the ssh way

Make sure that you have your ssh keys set up. Once they are you use almost the same clone command as above in "the easy way"

git clone git@github.com:LDSSA/setup.git

Take a note of the filepath on which you cloned the repo!

Note that if you choose this option, you will need to have your ssh keys set up.

Step 3 - Start your environment

Open up anaconda and create a new python 3.5 environment with

1. Click on "environments"
2. Click on "Create"
3. Select 3.5 and give it a name "ldsa"
4. Click create

NOTE that every time you start anaconda navigator, you will need to choose the ldsa environment! If you forget to do this, you will be missing some key things!

Step 4 - Install extra dependencies

Open a terminal with

1. Click on Environments
2. Click on the green arrow next to the ldsa environment name
3. Click open terminal

Now copy-paste the following lines into the terminal

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda install Cython==0.28.2 jupyter==1.0.0 matplotlib==2.2.2 mlxtend==0.11.0 numpy==1.14.2 pandas==0.22.0 scikit-learn==0.19.1 seaborn==0.8.1
pip install plotchecker==0.2.0

It will ask you for confirmation, just accept by typing "y" and then hitting the enter key.

Step 5 - Verify Success

Click on home and then run (install if needed) the jupyter notebook

In the freshly opened notebook, navigate to the root of this repository and open and run the Verify great success.ipynb notebook (you run cells by clicking on them and then pressing shift+enter). If you get a couple of pretty graphs, you are all good to go!

Final notes

Before the day

On the thursday before the academy, we will be asking you to clone another repository. With the new repo, you will do everything the same as in step 4 but nagivate to a different repository.

On git usage

• If you are trying to sync a notebook and you get a conflicts error, navigate to the directory and execute git stash before you sync again.