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Installing Standard Python

Standard python.exe installs from https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/. Pynapse works best with Python 3.7.

Note

We recommend installing 64-bit Python on 64-bit Windows 10. This is the Python 3.7.x "Windows x86-64 executable installer" option. The latest available version of 3.7.x is 3.7.9.

On 32-bit machines, install the Python 3.7.x "Windows x86 executable installer".

  1. During installation, select 'Customize Installation'

    1. Select 'Install for All Users' and 'Add Python to environment variables'

    2. Change the installation directory to C:\Python3

Environments

A Python virtual environment is a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages. The default environment is called 'base'.

Environments are simply directories on disk, so it is easy to delete/recreate environments if they get in a bad state. It is more difficult to do this with the 'base' environment. It is therefore recommended that you create a specific environment for Pynapse to use.

Environments are created in standard python.exe installation with the venv module.

From the command line:

python -m venv C:\Python3\envs\pynapse

To install pip packages from the command line (Start → cmd), you first activate the environment. Pynapse requires a few packages with specific versions (see https://github.com/ipython/ipykernel/issues/358 and https://github.com/ipython/ipykernel/issues/518 for more information).

C:\Python3\envs\pynapse\Scripts\activate.bat
pip install ipykernel==4.10.0 pyzmq==19.0.1 jedi==0.17.0 ipython_genutils==0.2.0

The tdt package is useful for offline data analysis:

pip install tdt

Pynapse Setup

  1. In Synapse, add the Python Coding Gizmo from the Specialized gizmo list.

  2. In Pynapse General Tab, set the Python Install Directory to your installed Python environment, which in this case is:

    C:\Python3\envs\pynapse\Scripts\python.exe

  3. In Synapse, go to Menu → Preferences. The Python Directory will have updated to the path you just used. Select 'Lock' so this path is the default path whenever you use a Pynapse gizmo.