What you need

• An installation of python, version 3.10 or above (3.12 recommended)
• Recommended: An Integrated Devolopment Environment (IDE), such as VSCode or PyCharm

How to install SpinW

We recommend that you use a virtual environment, for details of how to do this see below. pySpinW is available through pip, so to install you simply type:

pip install pyspinw

Updating

Updating to the latest pySpinW can be done through pip

pip install --upgrade package_name

Setting up a virtual environment

Windows

Many IDEs automatically set this up for you, so using your IDE’s tools are the recommended method. However, here is how to do it from the terminal:

If you have a modern python set-up, you can create a python 3.12 virtual environment with

py -3.12 -m venv VENV_NAME

where VENV_NAME is a arbitrary name given to you virtual environment (often people use .venv). If you don’t have a modern setup that supports the py command, you can use the following, as long as your python version is newer than 3.10

python -m venv VENV_NAME

Then “activate” this environment with

VENV_NAME\Scripts\Activate

Depending on how you are running this, you might need to run this first:

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

MacOS and Linux

You can create a python virtual environment with

python -m venv VENV_NAME

where VENV_NAME is a arbitrary name given to you virtual environment (often people use .venv). To activate it, use

source VENV_NAME/bin/activate

Have fun!