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

Using Virtual Environment

What is a Virtual Environment?

A Virtual Environment is a walled garden for Python projects.

Why should I use a Virtual Environment?

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

1. Firstly, it makes dependency management for the project easy.
2. Secondly, 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.

Mac OS X Setup

1. Create a folder where the virtual environments will live $ mkdir ~/python-venvs
2. To create a new environment named test-env execute $ python3 -m venv ~/python-envs/test-env
3. To activate the environment execute $ source ~/python-envs/test-env/bin/activate
4. Install ML-Agents package using $ pip3 install mlagents
5. To deactivate the environment execute $ deactivate

Ubuntu Setup

1. Install the python3-venv package using $ sudo apt-get install python3-venv
2. Follow steps 2-5 in the Mac OS X installation.

Windows Setup

Coming Soon.