Create a virtual environment

It is safest to install expertsystem within a virtual environment, so that all Python dependencies are contained within there. This is helpful in case something goes wrong with the dependencies: you can just trash the environment and recreate it. There are two options: Conda or Python’s venv.

Conda environment

Conda can be installed without administrator rights, see instructions on this page. Once installed, you can use the environment.yml file from the local repository to create a Conda environment for the expertsystem installation:

conda env create -f environment.yml

This command will take a few minutes, because all required dependencies will be installed in one go through pip. After Conda finishes creating the environment, you can activate it with as follows:

conda activate tw

You need to have the tw environment activated whenever you want to run expertsystem.

Python venv

Alternatively, you can use Python’s venv. All you have to do, is navigate into local repository and run:

python3 -m venv ./venv

This creates a folder called venv where all Python packages will be contained. You first have to activate the environment, and will have to do so whenever you want to run those Python packages.

source ./venv/bin/activate

Now you can safely install the required Python requirements through pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

That’s it, now you’re all set to install expertsystem!