What are Python packages
Python packages are collections of modules and functions that provide additional functionality beyond what is available in the Python standard library. They allow developers to easily extend Python’s capabilities by including pre-written code for specific tasks, such as data analysis, web development, machine learning, and more.
Installing Python packages
Anaconda’s Python Distribution comes with many of the packages we need to do scientific computing. If you’re interested in all the packages included, click here and go to the Python 3.x tab.
However, you may come across packages that are not installed by default. In this case we recommend you use the pip
package management tool to install them.
Installation steps
If your python 3 was found via python3 --version
on the previous page, then type pip3
instead of pip
for all of the following python plugins.
First let us update pip by typing the following into the terminal
pip install --upgrade pip
If you get an error, try typing instead:
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
You also need the package Selenium
as part of the web scraping tool kit we will build up. First let us install a depency for it via
pip install msgpack
We then install selenium
by entering the following into a terminal:
pip install selenium
pip
will then go through and install the package we asked for, and any other dependencies.
If this succeeded, the last line it printed out should be:
Successfully installed selenium-4.x.0
In order to update already installed packages on your system use the following command in your terminal:
pip install --upgrade selenium
Common problems
No administrator rights?
If you do not have administrator rights to the computer you are using,
please install packages only for your account.
You can do so by typing pip install --user packagename
, e.g., pip install --user selenium
.