Anaconda Vs Miniconda Vs Vanilla Python - Which one to use ? Confused ?

Have you heard about Anaconda or Miniconda ?

If you are a python developer or someone who is interested to learn python, you should definitely know this.

Here I will be explaining these from an individual user's perspective.

Anaconda - This is one of the world's popular opensource python distribution with lot of machine learning and datascience packages. This is the best option for someone who is interested to learn datascience & machine learning. This is like a complete ecosystem of libraries and packages for a data scientist or an advanced python programmer.

Miniconda - This is a minimal version of anaconda.  It is a small, bootstrap version of Anaconda that includes only conda, Python, the packages they depend on, and a small number of other useful packages, including pip, zlib and a few others.

Both Anaconda and Miniconda comes with conda package manager. Using conda, we can install the required package from several thousands of cloud repositories. So it is very easy to find and install dependent packages using conda.

Official Python - This is the standard version of Python. This uses pip package manager.

I would recommend miniconda for using as the development environment in windows for basic level python developers as it will be easy to handle the dependencies. Some of the packages will cause trouble while installing using pip in windows.

How to run python applications as system service in CentOS 7 or RHEL 7 ?

I started developing python applications from 2012. During my learning period, I was using screen in linux for running my python applications in the background. Majority of my colleagues were also following the same approach for running applications in background. The advantage of this approach was its easiness. But these screens will go away if the system gets rebooted. Also these applications will never get started on boot.

Systemd is a system and service manager for CentOS 7 and RHEL 7. This the first process that gets started after the system boots. This is compatible with the SysV init scripts used by CentOS 6 and RHEL 6.

It is very easy to run any custom application as a system service. In this way, the management will become very easy.

Suppose I have a python flask application app.py and I want to run it as a system service. I want to run this application under my unix user account amal.  

The contents of app.py is given below.




My code is located in the location /home/amal. Usually in case of any production deployment, the code will not be kept in the user home directory. This is to explain the scenario of running the application as a non root user.

The command to run my application is

python app.py 

For running in production mode with a WSGI like gunicorn, the command will be

gunicorn app:app --bind 0.0.0.0:8080 -w 2

For running this application as system service. We just need to do the following steps.

Create a file myapp.service in the location /etc/systemd/system/ The content of myapp.service is given below.


Now save the file and execute the following command. The following command will reload all the systemd configurations.

systemctl daemon-reload

Now we can start the application with the following command

systemctl start myapp

Now check the status of the application with the following command

systemctl status myapp

Also we can invoke the webservice using curl command.

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/

Python Code Snippet to get the hostname and IP address of a machine

The following python code snippet will return the IP address of a machine

import socket

ip_address = socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname())

print ip_address

host_name = socket.getfqdn()

print host_name

The IP address may not be proper in all the cases. If the /etc/hosts file of the unix machine contains entries with hostname mapped to 127.0.0.1, will return 127.0.0.1 as IP address. So for ensuring proper working, it will be better to use the fully qualified hostname method. 

Python program to check whether a number is Odd or Even

This is a very basic program in python for checking whether a given number is odd or even.

__author__ = 'coder'

def OddEven(number):
    try:
        remainder = number % 2
        if number == 0:
            print "Number is Zero"
        elif remainder == 0:
            print "Number is Even"
        else:
            print "Number is Odd"
    except:
        print "Error while processing"

if __name__ == '__main__':
    OddEven(11)