Installing Sprout

Warning

🚧 Sprout is still in active development and evolving quickly, so the documentation and functionality may not work as described and could undergo substantial changes 🚧

We designed Sprout to be installed for use either on your own computer (locally) or on a server (remote). This guide will walk you through installing Sprout. Regardless of how you install Sprout, you will need to use the Terminal.

Important

The Sprout Python package assumes you have full control over the folders and files of the system, or at least your user’s home directory. This includes being given space on a server that mostly has access through a Terminal, where you have control over the directories you can write to.

Before installing Sprout in either a virtual environment or system-wide, you need the following:

To check that you’ve installed these programs, run these commands in the Terminal to check their versions:

Terminal
python3 --version
pipx --version

Use in a project in a virtual environment

Python packages are generally recommended to be installed in a virtual environment. This is a way to isolate the packages you install for a specific project from the global system. There are several tools to manage package dependencies and create virtual environments, such as venv, virtualenv, and poetry. For this guide, we will use Poetry, with at least version >=2.0.

You can check that you’ve installed these programs by running this command in your Terminal:

Terminal
poetry --version

If you don’t have Poetry installed, you can install it using pipx:

Terminal
pipx install poetry
Important

We assume you’ve already created a Python project using poetry new and your working directory in the Terminal is the project folder, which you can determine with the pwd command. If you haven’t made a Python project using Poetry, follow the instructions on Poetry’s website.

You can now install Sprout directly from the GitHub repository by running the following command:

Terminal
poetry add git+https://github.com/seedcase-project/seedcase-sprout.git

You can check that Sprout has been installed correctly by running the following command in your terminal:

Terminal
poetry show seedcase_sprout

If it installed successfully, it will show details about Sprout.

Get started with your first data package by following the guide on Creating and managing data packages.

Use anywhere on the computer or in the Terminal

While we strongly recommend using Sprout in a virtual environment of a specific Python project folder, there are some situations where you might want to install Sprout system-wide. This will allow you to use Sprout from any folder on your computer or in the Terminal. The easiest way to do this is to use pipx.

Terminal
pipx install git+https://github.com/seedcase-project/seedcase-sprout.git

To check that Sprout has been installed correctly, run the following:

Terminal
pipx show seedcase_sprout

Now you can use seedcase_sprout in any Python script throughout your computer.