Skip to content

Setting Up Your Development Environment

This guide will walk you through setting up your virtual environment. Skip this tutorial if you already have a development environment set up.

Prerequisites

Python 3.8 or higher: If you haven’t installed Python yet, download it from the official website.

Installing a Virtual Environment Manager

We’ll use Python’s built-in venv module to create a virtual environment.

Create a Project Directory

First, create a directory for your project and navigate into it:

mkdir rag-project
cd rag-project

Create a Virtual Environment

Create a virtual environment named env:

python3 -m venv env

Activate the Virtual Environment

Activate the virtual environment to start using it.

env\Scripts\activate
source env/bin/activate

After activation, your command prompt should be prefixed with (env).

Your development environment is now ready! In the next chapter, we’ll dive into preparing your dataset and building the core components of your RAG system.