How do I set up a Python development environment on Linux?

Question

I'm a .NET developer who knows very little about Python, but want to give it a test drive for a small project I'm working on.

What tools and packages should I install on my machine? I'm looking for a common, somewhat comprehensive, development environment.

I'll likely run Ubuntu 9.10, but I'm flexible. If Windows is a better option, that's fine too.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not looking for the bare minimum to get a Python program to run. I wouldn't expect a newbie .NET dev to use notepad and a compiler. I'd recommend Visual Studio, NUnit, SQL Server, etc.

Answer 1

Your system already has Python on it. Use the text editor or IDE of your choice; I like vim.

I can't tell you what third-party modules you need without knowing what kind of development you will be doing. Use apt as much as you can to get the libraries.

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To speak to your edit:

This isn't minimalistic, like handing a .NET newbie notepad and a compiler: a decent text editor and the stdlib are all you really need to start out. You will likely need third-party libraries to develop whatever kind of applications you are writing, but I cannot think of any third-party modules all Python programmers will really need or want.

Unlke the .NET/Windows programming world, there is no one set of dev tools that stands above all others. Different people use different editors a whole lot. In Python, a module namespace is fully within a single file and project organization is based on the filesystem, so people do not lean on their IDEs as hard. Different projects use different version control software, which has been booming with new faces recently. Most of these are better than TFS and all are 1000 times better than SourceSafe.

When I want an interactive session, I use the vanilla Python interpreter. Various more fancy interpreters exist: bpython, ipython, IDLE. bpython is the least fancy of these and is supposed to be good about not doing weird stuff. ipython and IDLE can lead to strange bugs where code that works in them doens't work in normal Python and vice-versa; I've seen this first hand with IDLE.

For some of the tools you asked about and some others

• In .NET you would use NUnit. In Python, use the stdlib unittest module. There are various third-party extensions and test runners, but unittest should suit you okay.
  • If you really want to look into something beyond this, get unittest2, a backport of the 2.7 version of unittest. It has incorporated all the best things from the third-party tools and is really neat.
• In .NET you would use SQL Server. In Python, you may use PostgreSQL, MySQL, sqlite, or some other database. Python specifies a unified API for databases and porting from one to another typically goes pretty smoothly. sqlite is in the stdlib.
  • There are various Object Relational Models to make using databases more abstracted. SQLAlchemy is the most notable of these.
• If you are doing network programming, get Twisted.
• If you are doing numerical math, get numpy and scipy.
• If you are doing web development, choose a framework. There are about 200000: Pylons, zope, Django, CherryPy, werkzeug...I won't bother starting an argument by recommending one. Most of these will happily work with various servers with a quick setting.
• If you want to do GUI development, there are quite a few Python bindings. The stdlib ships with Tk bindings I would not bother with. There are wx bindings (wxpython), GTK+ bindings (pygtk), and two sets of Qt bindings. If you want to do native Windows GUI development, get IronPython and do it in .NET. There are win32 bindings, but they'll make you want to pull your hair out trying to use them directly.