Setting up a Python Development Environment in Eclipse

Key Takeaways

hey everybody how's it going in this video we will learn how to set up a python development environment using the Eclipse IDE and the piev plug-in um so if you've watched my videos before then you've probably noticed that I do a lot of my Python Programming within a text editor called Sublime Text now the reason that I use that for my tutorials is because it's nice and clean and there's not a lot of other bells and whistles that are getting in the way and it really allows us just to uh Focus on the code but an IDE which is an integrated development environment uh it does have some advantages over a text editor so for example if you want to debug your code then Eclipse will allow us to set break points and uh and step through line by line in our code and print out variables and step into functions and a lot of different um things that we just can't do in a text editor um so in this video we will get Eclipse installed and also get a python environment set up to where we can begin writing python code so right now I'm over here on the eclipse website and um so the first thing that we're going to do is install this Eclipse installer so let's go ahead I'm going to Mac so I'm going to download this Eclipse installer it's going to take us to the another download page here and I'm just going to click this download link here and it will take you to a uh donation page eclipse is open source software so if you have the money to make a donation then I'm sure they' appreciate it but if uh if not then we can just wait for our download to finish okay so that download has finished so I'm going to go ahead and open up this Eclipse installer okay now first thing when you open up the eclipse installer uh right off the bat you might see this over here that says that it needs an update so let's go ahead and run that update and it'll restart the installer for us okay so now we've restarted that installer now this is the point where some people get confused because there's not a specific version of eclipse just for python right out of the box so you can see here that we have an eclipse ID for Java developers for C and C++ PHP um and all these different things now a lot of people will just download the Java developers version and then add in all the python stuff after that on their own um and it does come with some uh it already does come with a get client and the marketplace and things like that um but really I uh don't like that extra overhead so kind of what I like to start with whenever I'm doing python development is just to start with the eclipse platform and you can see here that it says that this package contains the absolute minable IDE suitable only as a base for installing other tools um and that's what we want to do we're going to install a python um environment on top of this so I'm going to go ahead and choose that platform and you can choose the Java version if you'd like and everything will still work just fine um but now that we're in here I'm just going to accept these defaults it's going to install the Java jvm and then the installation folder you can choose where it installs Eclipse so I'm just going to choose install here and let this finish now once this finishes here I'm just going to go ahead and launch this and when it first pops up it may ask us a couple of things so for example it's going to ask us ask us to select a workspace and this is where it will uh put all of our projects and files so I'm just going to accept this default location here and so now we have a new version of eclipse here so I'm just going to uh maximize this and then I'm going to click on go to workbench here okay so now that we're within here uh now we want to install piev piev is a plugin which will allow us to do python development um so for example right now right out of the box if we go up here go file new project you can see here that all we have is this General project here there's nothing that is python specific so to fix this let's go to help and we want to install new software now the new software that I'm going to install is one called Marketplace um now this is something that allows us to install uh things in the future a little bit more easily now Marketplace comes installed already if you were to choose the Java version but from where we started from just the bare minimum Eclipse platform uh we need to install the marketplace so I'm just going to choose all available sites here for what to work with and then I'm just going to search for market and it should find that for us so it's here under general purpose tools Marketplace client so I'm going to go ahead and choose that and then walk through this installation process and go ahead and accept these terms and choose all the defaults so now it is installed and it says that we need to restart Eclipse that's probably going to happen a few times while we're doing this so let's go ahead and do that so now that we have restarted Eclipse we should have the uh Marketplace installed so now if we click on help instead of going to install new software let's go ahead and click on this Eclipse marketplace now the marketplace is just a more visually appealing uh area to download new software rather than the uh where we were before where we had to manually look through all those different sites for the M Marketplace and things like that so what we want to install here in the marketplace is piev now we can either search for it uh but it's also very popular so we just if we just click on this popular tab then it should just be the third or fourth one down from the bottom and you can see uh you can also install whatever else you want here you can see that there are some color themes uh some ways to integrate Eclipse with subversion um so if we scroll down here you can see that piev I think it was like the fifth one down so we can just click install here and it's going to tell us uh all the things that we need to install with this so let's go ahead and click confirm and let this run through now I'm going to go ahead and accept these terms and click finish and now this may take a while to install here I'm going to go ahead and trust these certificates and click okay now once that is finished installing then we'll have to restart Eclipse again so let's go ahead and do that okay so now we have piev installed so we should be able to go to file new project like we did before but now instead of just general here we have this piev option and if we um go down in into here we can see that we can make a Jango project we can make a Google Google app engine project or just a piev project and this is just for your regular python projects so I'm going to choose piev project and click next and then I'm just going to call this project name uh demoore project and then we can Cho use all of the defaults here you can see that's it's going to put it into our workspace here we can choose our python version that we want to use I'm just going to leave it at 2.7 now it may choose an interpreter for you but it may uh say that you don't have an interpreter selected so what I'm just going to do here is click on please configure an interpreter and just let it autoc config it's just going to choose my default python interpreter so that may have already selected the default interpreter for you but if it didn't then you can just click on U that link that I clicked on and uh click on the Quick Auto configuration and it should set the default interpreter for you so for everything else I'm just going to leave the defaults and click finish and now this is going to pop up and say that this kind of project is an is associated with the piev perspective do you want to open this perspective now uh I'm just going to click on remember my decision and hit yes and I usually recommend that you open up the piev perspective because um it lays out all your windows here in the way that um they believe is best for python development and if you don't entirely like the layout then you can always customize it yourself later on um so now we have this demo project here and I'm just going to right click on this demo project and go to new and now you can see that we have uh file but instead of file I'm going to choose piev module so now this is another case where an IDE kind of comes in handy over a text editor because this can set up a lot of stuff for us so for example if I want to put my module directly inside of a package so I can just do a testore package as the name of the package that I want to put it in and you can see here it's going to say note package not found which which mean it it doesn't exist yet and that they will create it for us so now the name of my module I'm just going to call this test module and uh I don't think you need to put the pi yeah so it says that the name may not contain any dots so it'll put the pi extension on for you so just call it uh test module or whatever you want to call it and click finish and then it's going to C uh pop up with some preferences here and I'm just going to leave these defaults and click okay and now it's going to ask us if we want to use a template so uh if we use the empty template then it's just going to uh put the the timestamp at the top of the file but if you're going to write a class or something like that then you can choose the class template and it'll fill in a lot of boilerplate code for you like it'll put the um the dunder and it function in for you and uh and things like that but I'm just going to choose the empty template and you can make your own templates also if you have a specific way that you like to make new files but for now I'm just going to hit and um you may see this pop up to read documentation for pev I'm just going to click on show later okay so now I have my newly created uh test module and you can see that it did add in uh the date and the author here um and you can also see over here on the right within our project that when we put this within a package it went ahead and made the uh init file for us over here and everything like that so it's nice that it went ahead and made all the files that we need in order to make this a package um so now we should be ready to write some code here so if I just do a print uh hello world now I am in Python uh 27 still so uh the print function is going to look like this and now I can just go ahead and run this code when I run it it's going to ask me if I want to run it as a python or as a unit test so I'm just going to choose python click okay and now you can see that it ran our code here and it's showing the output within the cont console so really if you wanted just a basic python uh setup in Eclipse then you should be done you can go ahead and do whatever it is that you need to do uh but I'm also going to show you some of my um uh more favorite preferences here so for example the first thing I'm going to do is change the font and make it a little bit bigger and I also like dark themes uh just because uh whenever I'm looking at a computer sometimes these really bright themes uh kind of hurt my eyes after some time um so for here for the theme instead of Mac I'm going to choose dark and for the color and font theme I'm also going to choose well I'll just leave that at default and click apply and see how this looks okay so that looks good there with the Dark theme and now I'm also going to expand the appearance here and go on colors and fonts and for the basic font which will control this font in here um I'm going to scroll down and the text font is what you want want to change to change uh the font within um your source code editor here so I'm going to edit this and I'm going to use uh source code Pro and I'm going to set this just so you guys can see better I'm going to choose size 18 for now and apply that and click okay and actually I'm going to open up these preferences one more time and uh show you guys um it looks like this font got set to something else here maybe I don't have source code Pro installed on this machine or my uh um uh clicks are just kind of moving around here funny uh okay so yeah that's what I wanted there now there are also some piev specific preferences that we can run so if we look over here in the right we have this piev option so if I uh expand this then within editor I'm going to open this up now within here you can specifically choose how you want uh certain things to look as far as your decorators and numbers and things like that um but really uh the one thing that I like to select whenever I uh first um install Clips is to go in here to code style and then code formatter and I like to automatically set my code to be autop pep 8 compliant so I'm going to click this um use autop pep 8 for code formatting now if there are any I don't know you don't if you don't know what autop pep eight is it's not a big deal but it's just a way to uh kind of check your code for certain um in to make your code more consistent and also uh if there's anything that you want to ignore with auto Pepe you can look all these up online um then you can put in your ignores here so if there's certain errors that you want to skip over then you can do this-- ignore uh within here and set it up that way now I'm also going to click here on Save actions and uh it says that the apply save actions um I'm going to do an auto format editor contents before saving now what this means is that I don't have to uh what it's just going to uh autof format all of the code um right before I save the code so now I'm going to go down here to apply and click okay and then click okay here so now for example if I go to write a function and do a test function here and then just pass this and then do a test to function and then go to save it now let me put in the passcode here as well and now you can see whenever I save that it uh automatically put in the spacing between these two different functions so I like that auto pep8 uh selection if you don't like it then you can turn it off but uh it's nice whenever you're working on large projects for everybody to have all their spacing and everything like that consistent so that about does it for the basic python setup within eclipse that I wanted to show you guys um now if you do want to install more software then I would give the marketplace a look um you know Eclipse has a lot of different plugins so they have plugins for uh git if you want to use uh some git functionality within Eclipse um they have other color themes that you can choose from uh this default color theme here it isn't the one that I usually use I usually uh install some other ones um that look a little bit better so if you want to look at any of those then you can just uh do a search here if I just type in um color then some stuff will come back and also I would give the uh popular tab a look because if you click on the popular tab then these are some of the more um popular color themes and also um like I said some of the plugins that people frequently use like this so this one is for subversion and they also have this moonrise Dark theme that is uh likely a little bit different than this dark theme here so I would definitely give all those a uh look all those over and uh try to set this up to the way that you like it but that about does it for this video um if you have any questions about this stuff just ask in the comment section below uh be sure to subscribe for future videos I uh maybe I'll make some videos on how to debug projects within eclipse and things like that so hopefully you all found this uh video useful and thank you for watching what