Setup: Before Creating Content#

Fortunately and unfortunately, committing to open-source projects usually requires more in-depth knowledge than just pushing some slides onto Dropbox and sending a link to your students.

To replicate the showcased websites here, we’ll therefore be using some tools you might not be familiar with. The following section will illustrate precisely what we need, how to install the necessary tools, and where to go for further information.

We’ll need the following:

Helpful tools that are not strictly necessary but can be quite useful or make your life easier:

If you want to provide interactive online content, you may use:

  • MyBinder (Find more info in the section: Creating interactive content)

General things#

If you foresee any of these being a problem, please contact one of the instructors and enquire what steps you can take to ensure your setup is ready for the course.

You’ll find the (hopefully) comprehensive set of install instructions below. The rest of this page provides more detail on installation procedures for each of the above elements, with separate instructions for each of the three major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, and Linux).

Some quick general notes on instructions#

  • There is no difference between Enter and Return in these instructions, so just press whatever the equivalent on your keyboard is whenever one is stated

  • If you already have some of these things installed on your computer already, that should (theoretically) be okay. However, you need to ensure that you can complete the steps described in checking your install without issue.

    • For example, having multiple different Python installations on your computer can lead to incredibly frustrating issues that are very difficult to debug. As such, if you have already installed Python via some other application (not Miniconda/Anaconda), it’s strongly encouraged to uninstall it before following the instructions below.

OS-specific installation instructions#

Select the tab that corresponds to your operating system and follow the instructions therein.

Conda

  1. Download and execute the .exe file from the official website

  2. An installation window will pop up; go ahead and click through it and install it into the suggested default directory.

Or follow the official installation guide

Jupyter, Jupyter Book and nbgrader

  1. Press “Windows” and Search for “Anaconda Powershell Prompt”

  2. Paste the following commands into the opened terminal:

  • conda install -c conda-forge jupyter-book

  • conda install -c conda-forge nbgrader

  • conda install jupyter

Git

Download the respective version for your system from the official website and run the .exe file. Now, you should be good to go. As Git can be quite confusing for new users, you may also want to install a GUI (graphical user interface) that makes it somewhat easier to interact and illustrate what git is actually doing/supposed to do, such as Gitkraken.

VSCode

  1. Go to https://code.visualstudio.com/ and click the download button, then run the .exe file.

  2. Leave all the defaults during the installation with the following exception:

    • Please make sure the box labeled “Register Code as an editor for supported file types” is selected

VSCode extensions

  1. Open VSCode

  2. Press Ctrl+Shift+P in the new window that opens and type “Extensions: Install extensions” into the search bar that appears at the top of the screen. Select the appropriate entry from the dropdown menu that appears (there should be four entries; simply select the one that reads “Extensions: Install extensions”).

  3. A new panel with a search bar should appear on the left-hand side of the screen. Search for each of the following extensions and press Install for the first entry that appears. (The author listed for all of these extensions should be “Microsoft.”)

    • Python (n.b., you will need to reload VSCode after installing this)

    • Jupyter

Conda

  1. You most likely already have a working setup but feel free to download the appropriate file for your system from the official website and follow the installation institutions .

Jupyter, Jupyter Book and nbgrader

  1. Open a terminal

  2. Paste the following commands into the opened terminal:

  • conda install -c conda-forge jupyter-book

  • conda install conda install -c conda-forge nbgrader

  • conda install jupyter

Git

You may already have it; try opening a terminal and typing sudo apt-get install git (Ubuntu, Debian) or sudo yum install git (Fedora) inside the terminal. If you are prompted to install it, follow the instructions on-screen.

VSCode

  1. Go to https://code.visualstudio.com/ and click the download button for the .deb (Ubuntu, Debian) or the .rpm (Fedora, CentOS) file.

  2. Double-click the downloaded file to install VSCode. (You may be prompted to type your administrator password during the installation.)

VSCode extensions

  1. Open the Visual Studio Code application.

  2. Press Ctrl+Shift+P in the new window that opens and type “Extensions: Install extensions” into the search bar that appears at the top of the screen. Select the appropriate entry from the dropdown menu that appears (there should be four entries; simply select the one that reads “Extensions: Install extensions”).

  3. A new panel with a search bar should appear on the left-hand side of the screen. Search for each of the following extensions and press Install for the first entry that appears. (The author listed for all of these extensions should be “Microsoft.”)

    • Python (n.b., you will need to reload VSCode after installing this)

    • Jupyter

Conda

  1. Download and execute the appropriate file from the official website

  2. Open a terminal at the location of the downloaded file and run: bash Miniconda3-latest-MacOSX-x86_64.sh.

Or follow the official installation guide

Jupyter, Jupyter Book and nbgrader

  1. Open a terminal

  2. Paste the following commands into the opened terminal:

  • conda install -c conda-forge jupyter-book

  • conda install conda install -c conda-forge nbgrader

  • conda install jupyter

Git

You may already have it! Try opening a terminal and typing git --version. If you do not see something like “git version X.XX.X” printed out, then follow these steps:

  1. Follow this link to automatically download an installer.

  2. Double click the downloaded file (git-2.23.0-intel-universal-mavericks.dmg) and then double click the git-2.23.0-intel-universal-mavericks.pkg icon inside the dmg that is opened.

  3. Follow the on-screen instructions to install the package.

VSCode

  1. Go to https://code.visualstudio.com/ and click the download button.

  2. Unzip the downloaded file (e.g., VSCode-darwin-stable.zip) and move the resulting Visual Studio Code file to your Applications directory.

VSCode extensions

  1. Open the Visual Studio Code application

  2. Type Cmd+Shift+P and then enter “Shell command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH” into the search bar that appears at the top of the screen. Select the highlighted entry. A notification box should appear in the bottom-right corner, indicating that the command was installed successfully.

  3. Type Cmd+Shift+P again and then enter “Extensions: Install extensions” into the search bar. Select the appropriate entry from the dropdown menu that appears (there should be four entries; simply select the one that reads “Extensions: Install extensions”).

  4. A new panel with a search bar should appear on the left-hand side of the screen. Search for each of the following extensions and press Install for the first entry that appears. (The author listed for all of these extensions should be “Microsoft.”)

    • Python (n.b., you will need to reload VSCode after installing this)

    • Jupyter

Note: If the instructions aren’t working and you have spent more than 15-20 minutes troubleshooting on your own, reach out on the #help-installation channel on the Discord channel with the exact problems you’re having. One of the instructors will try to get back to you quickly to help resolve the situation. If they’re unable to help via Discord, you may be directed to attend one of the installation office hours.

GitHub account#

Go to join/ and follow the on-screen instructions to create an account. It is a good idea to associate this with your university e-mail (if you have one) as this will entitle you to sign up for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which comes with some nice free bonuses.

Enter the matrix#

Once you reach this point, you should be ready to enter the matrix and follow the course in your preferred way. Congrats, fantastic work!

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Next Section:#

Introduction/Why JB-Notebooks All things gotta start somewhere, but how and why?