Installing Anaconda

Anaconda is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. You can find the installers and installation instructions at https://www.anaconda.com/download/.

If you already have Python installed on your computer, this won't break anything. Instead, the default Python used by your scripts and programs will be the one that comes with Anaconda.

Choose the Python 3.6 version, you can install Python 2 versions later. Also, choose the 64-bit installer if you have a 64-bit operating system, otherwise go with the 32-bit installer. Go ahead and choose the appropriate version, then install it. Continue on afterwards!

After installation, you’re automatically in the default conda environment with all packages installed which you can see below. You can check out your own install by entering conda list into your terminal.

On Windows

A bunch of applications are installed along with Anaconda:

• Anaconda Navigator, a GUI for managing your environments and packages
• Anaconda Prompt, a terminal where you can use the command line interface to manage your environments and packages
• Spyder, an IDE geared toward scientific development

To avoid errors later, it's best to update all the packages in the default environment. Open the Anaconda Prompt application. In the prompt, run the following commands:

conda upgrade conda
conda upgrade --all

and answer yes when asked if you want to install the packages. The packages that come with the initial install tend to be out of date, so updating them now will prevent future errors from out of date software.

Note: In the previous step, running conda upgrade conda should not be necessary because --all includes the conda package itself, but some users have encountered errors without it.

In the rest of this lesson, I'll be asking you to use commands in your terminal. I highly suggest you start working with Anaconda this way, then later use the GUI if you'd like.

Troubleshooting

If you are seeing the following "conda command not found" and are using ZShell, you have to do the following:

• Add export PATH="/Users/username/anaconda/bin:$PATH" to your .zsh_config file.