Getting your PC ready for Python

It doesn’t matter if you’re running Windows, mac-OS or Linux, you should be able to run Python locally on your computer (or) make your pc ready for python. It may even already be installed in your system. To check whether you already have Python installed on your computer, open a terminal or command prompt and execute the Python command, passing –version as a parameter.

To get your PC ready for Python, We can use external modules for a bunch of tasks, like generating PDFs, starting web pages, creating compressed files, interacting with email, and a lot of other things. So how do we find what modules are available? When developers write a Python module that they think others might find useful, they publish it in PyPI, also known as the Python Package Index. We can browse the repository of Python modules to find the module we need. It includes thousands of projects which are classified by different categories, like the topic, development studies, and intended audience. The external modules are generally managed by the command line tool called pip. This is a cross-platform tool so you can use it to install, update, and remove external modules on whichever operating system you’re running on your computer.

Windows computers don’t usually come with Python preinstalled. To check if your computer has Python installed, run the command we talked about earlier,

python–version.

If you get a python version starting with 3 great! you can move with the next steps if not we’ll need to install it. There are a bunch of ways to do this on Windows. Go to python.org the official website. From here we can download the installer for Python-3 64-bit architecture. Most computers today are installed with 64-bit installations. So if you don’t know which one to pick, pick that one, unless you know for sure that your computer is running a 32-bit installation. This will install new software on our machine, so we need to run it as an administrator user. Before clicking on the install now button, make sure you click on the add Python 3.7 to Path box.
It might take a moment. Now that it’s done, we can test to see that it worked. We do this by opening a new Power-shell and executing the same command as before.