Virtualenv

Last year, Apple announced that they would transition their entire Mac line from Intel processors to their ARM64 Apple Silicon chip called the M1. Several weeks ago, I started testing development on MacBook Air with the Apple M1 chip (pictured above).

This is how to set up the One True Development Environment for Python.

Haha, just kidding, there is no such thing. Here's one way to do it that works for me, and an attempt to explain the benefits of doing it this way.

I recently looked into whether I could use pip-tools to improve my workflow around projects' Python dependencies. My conclusion was that pip-tools would help on some projects, but it wouldn't do everything I wanted, and I couldn't use it everywhere. (I tried pip-tools version 2.0.2 in August 2018. If there are newer versions, they might fix some of the things I ran into when trying pip-tools.)

Even Python learning materials that get into very advanced language features rarely mention some practical things that would be very helpful to know as soon as you start working on more serious projects, like:

Eclipse with the PyDev module has a lot to offer the Python programmer these days. If you haven't looked at PyDev before, or not in a while, it's worth checking out.

Deployment is usually a tedious process with lots of tinkering until everything is setup just right. We deploy quite a few Django sites on a regular basis here at Caktus and still do tinkering, but we've attempted to functionalize some of the core tasks to ease the process. I've put together a basic example that outlines local and remote environment setup. This is a simplified example and just one of many ways to deploy a Django project (I learned a lot from Jacob Kaplan-Moss' django-deployment-workshop), so I encourage you to browse around the Django community to learn more. The entire source for this example project can be found in the caktus-deployment Bitbucket repository.