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

Warning

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

Updating packages

In order to update already installed packages on your system use the following command in your terminal:

pip install --upgrade selenium

Common problems

Tip

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.