Installation

For the course

You will normally not need to install Python on your computer before your Python Charmers course.

For face-to-face courses, we will normally install this together in the first 10 minutes of the course.

For online courses, you will normally access our cloud coding server https://cpuhub.pythoncharmers.com via your browser (Firefox, Chrome, or Safari). (We will send you login details shortly before the course starts.)

For before or after the course

To install and use Python on your own computer either before or after your Python Charmers course, we recommend the latest Anaconda Python 3 installer. This comes with Python and several hundred of the most important 3rd-party packages.

Choose to install it for your user account only and choose a folder name without a space in it. (Examples: C:\Python3, /home/user/anaconda.)

Check your licence before installing Anaconda at work

Anaconda changed its terms of service in 2024. The Anaconda distribution and its default package channels are free for individuals and for organizations with fewer than 200 employees, but organizations with 200 or more employees or contractors need a paid licence. Accredited educational institutions are exempt when using it for teaching and research.

If your organization is over that threshold and does not hold a licence, use Miniforge instead. It gives you the same conda tool but installs from the community-run conda-forge channel, which is free for everyone. Your Python Charmers trainer can help you get set up.

More details

Feel free to skip the rest of this chapter if the above instructions are enough. Otherwise, read on for more details about installing Python via Anaconda.

Python 3

The latest version is Python 3.14, released in October 2025. We will use Python 3 for the training course.

When we refer to "Python 3" in these notes, we assume any version of Python equal to or greater than version 3.10. Python 2 reached end of life in January 2020 and is not covered here.

Installation requirements

We highly recommend at least 8 GB of memory (RAM) and a 64-bit operating system. All of the 3 major operating systems are supported: Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Anaconda Python

We recommend installing Python via the Anaconda distribution, because it:

• is free for individuals and smaller organizations (see the licensing note above)
• can be installed without Administrator / root privileges
• supports all three major platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux)
• is up-to-date
• can be upgraded easily
• provides binaries of many of the traditionally hardest-to-install packages, like SciPy, scikit-learn, Numba, PIL (via Pillow), lxml, and libraries for geospatial analysis.

The Anaconda Python 3 installer is available here. Miniforge is the equivalent that is free for organizations of any size.

We highly recommend that you install Anaconda:

1. for your user account (not for all users). This way you can install and remove packages later without needing Administrator / root access privileges.
2. in a folder without spaces. For example: C:\Python3 or /home/user/anaconda are good choices. Spaces in the Python path occasionally cause scripts to break.

Help?

If you would like any help installing Python before or after your course, please contact us at help@pythoncharmers.com.

Summary

The rest of this Course Preparation site assumes that you have Python installed on your computer.