ml-agents/docs/Using-Virtual-Environment.md

Using Virtual Environment

What is a Virtual Environment?

A Virtual Environment is a self contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages. To learn more about Virtual Environments see here

Why should I use a Virtual Environment?

A Virtual Environment keeps all dependencies for the Python project separate from dependencies of other projects. This has a few advantages:

1. It makes dependency management for the project easy.
2. It enables using and testing of different library versions by quickly spinning up a new environment and verifying the compatibility of the code with the different version.

Requirement - Python 3.6 must be installed on the machine you would like to run ML-Agents on (either local laptop/desktop or remote server). Python 3.6 can be installed from here.

Installing Pip (Required)

1. Download the get-pip.py file using the command curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
2. Run the following python3 get-pip.py
3. Check pip version using pip3 -V

Note (for Ubuntu users): If the ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util' error is encountered, then python3-distutils needs to be installed. Install python3-distutils using sudo apt-get install python3-distutils

Mac OS X Setup

1. Create a folder where the virtual environments will reside $ mkdir ~/python-envs
2. To create a new environment named sample-env execute $ python3 -m venv ~/python-envs/sample-env
3. To activate the environment execute $ source ~/python-envs/sample-env/bin/activate
4. Verify pip version is the same as in the Installing Pip section. In case it is not the latest, upgrade to the latest pip version using pip3 install --upgrade pip
5. Install ML-Agents package using $ pip3 install mlagents
6. To deactivate the environment execute $ deactivate

Ubuntu Setup

1. Install the python3-venv package using $ sudo apt-get install python3-venv
2. Follow the steps in the Mac OS X installation.

Windows Setup

1. Create a folder where the virtual environments will reside $ md python-envs
2. To create a new environment named sample-env execute $ python3 -m venv python-envs\sample-env
3. To activate the environment execute $ python-envs\sample-env\Scripts\activate
4. Verify pip version is the same as in the Installing Pip section. In case it is not the latest, upgrade to the latest pip version using pip3 install --upgrade pip
5. Install ML-Agents package using $ pip3 install mlagents
6. To deactivate the environment execute $ deactivate