Category: Environment

In the context of my AI notes, here is what you need to know about the .env file

Any file that starts with a . is a hidden file according to linux, windows is a bot funny about such files, it allows their existance, as long as you don’t try to use windows explorer to name or rename into them.

On linux, if you want the ls command to show such files, you would execute the command “ls -a“

Now, with that out of the way, let me start with a few variables for various providers

# Open AI (ChatGPT)
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-xxxx
# Google AI (Gemeni)
GOOGLE_API_KEY=xxxx
# Anthropic (Claude)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=xxxx
# Huging face (HF_TOKEN is short for hugging face token)
HF_TOKEN=xxxx

If you are familiar with python, you probably are also familiar with pip, and very likely familiar with venv (Virtual environments)

There is nothing special in particular about this for AI, it is exactly as you would for an odoo installation for example

For AI, i would totally recommend anaconda, but if for some reason that is not an option, this option will do 100% of the time

So, you need to start by installing Python 3 !, On debian, I would just use the repository with apt, it may be true at the time of writing that in the repo it uses 3.11 rather than the latest 3.13, but that is absolutely fine

sudo apt update
// The following command should do
sudo apt install python3
//But i would much rather install everything python in one go
apt install build-essential wget git python3-pip python3-dev python3-venv \
     python3-wheel libfreetype6-dev libxml2-dev libzip-dev libsasl2-dev \
     python3-setuptools

Now, with that out of the way, navigate to the project’s folder (Assuming you have downloaded a project for example), and create a virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv

Now, you can activate that project with

source venv/bin/activate
//On windows, the above should look something like
venv\Scripts\activate

That is basically it, you will now need to, from within the command prompt of the venv, install dependencies either one by one using the pip command, or point it to a file containing the dependencies, for example

pip install -r requirements.txt

You should now be good to go !