Enterprise Automation with Python: Automate Excel, Web, Documents, Emails, and Various Workloads with Easy-to-code Python Scripts

CHAPTER 1

Setting Up the Automation Environment

Introduction

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the installation steps and setting up the development environment for Python. We will also cover the installation of Python packages and libraries required for building automations.

Structure

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Installing and getting started with Mu for Python 3

Installing third party packages with Mu

Objectives

After studying this chapter, you will be able to set the automation environment on your machine. You will also get an understanding of Python development environments and be able to run Python on your machine.

Installing and getting started with Mu for Python 3

The code with Mu is a simple Python editor for beginner programmers. Download Mu installer from https://codewith.mu/en/download. Find the installer you just downloaded (it’s probably in your Downloads folder). Double click on the installer to run it. If you get any warning while installing, accept those warnings and run the installer. Once the installation has completed successfully, click on Finish to close the installer.

Start Mu

You can start Mu by clicking on the icon in the Start menu or by typing Mu in the Search box. The first run will take a bit of time, and it will install and load all the required modules. Once you have started Mu, the code editor will look as shown in the following figure:

Figure 1.1: Mu code editor

The button bar in Mu contains buttons for creating and running the Python code along with the help instructions:

Figure 1.2: Mu code editor toolbar

The following are the button descriptions to help you get started with Mu:

The Mode button is used for changing Mu modes. We will use the Python 3Mode in this book:

Figure 1.3: Mu change mode view

The New, Load, and Save allow you to interact with files on your computer’s hard drive:

New: This creates a new blank file.

Load: This opens a file selector to choose a file to load into Mu.

Save: This saves the file to your computer’s hard drive. If the file has no name, you’ll be asked to give one.

The Run button runs the current script. When the code is running, the Run button turns into a Stop button. Click on Stop to force your code to exit in a clean way.

The Debug button will start Mu’s visual debugger allowing you to debug Python programs.

The REPL button creates a new panel and the code you type here is evaluated line by line by Python.

You can learn more about the Mu editor from the Mu tutorial page - https://codewith.mu/en/tutorials/1.1/.

If you are an experienced programmer, then you can also use other Python code editing tools such as PyCharm, VS Code, Jupyter notebook, or any other code editor tool that works for you.

Installing third party packages with Mu

In this book, we will use a lot of third party packages to complete our automation scripts. Packages (sometimes called libraries or modules) are re-usable code that you can download, install, and use in your programs. They reduce the development time exponentially as you don’t have to rewrite the code to achieve the same functionality in your project.

One of the main advantages of Python is that they have a huge collection of packages that allow you to achieve the desired functionality in your programs.

Mu comes with its own package installer which will download the code from the Python Package Index pypi.org and install it so that you can use it in your Mu