Add miniconda installation instructions for industrial practitioners

[sscardapane]

Add miniconda installation instructions for industrial practitioners

[sscardapane]

Good point! The local set-up is the only place I have used Anaconda. I made a test with this configuration on Ubuntu 20.04 with Python virtual environments and everything works:

python3 -m venv reprodl
source reprodl/bin/activate

pip install notebook matplotlib pandas ipywidgets pathlib
pip install torch torchvision torchaudio
pip install pytorch-lightning

Would there be any issue to this solution in your case?

[sscardapane]

1. Creating a requirements.txt is actually part of one of the exercises. If some of the updates create unexpected changes, I will update the setup instructions to mention a particular version.
2. Good point, I followed the PyTorch instructions, so I am guessing cudatoolkit is automatically installed in that case.

[sscardapane]

I am closing it now, I'll update the README and possibly re-open it if I have additional issues with virtual environments. Thanks for the feedback! 🙂

[AndreaPi]

Ok, so you would update the README file to show that conda isn't strictly needed for the local set-up. One can simply create a Python 3 venv, activate it and then pip install stuff to it. Sounds perfect! I liked my solution because it also showed ML users in industry who needed conda, how to access its goodies without having to rely on Anaconda. However, this is a tangential issue with respect to your course goals. Since you don't use conda later on, your solution is more straightforward.
Just two minor notes:

1. given the course emphasis on reproducibility, wouldn't it be better to freeze the package version requirements in a requirements.txt file? I'm sure you did it on purpose, in order to cover requirements.txt files later in the course. I was wondering however if there might be a future scenario in which the initial installation (notebook, matplotlib....pytorch-lightning) breaks because of incompatible updates. Probably very unlikely though.
2. you didn't include cudatoolkit=10.2 in the pip install chain here, but it's included in the original one. Is this just a typo, or isn't it actually needed?

[AndreaPi]

Ok! Shall I close the issue or do you want to update the README first and then close the issue yourself?

EDIT: concerning the PyTorch instructions for pip install, they suggest using pip3... Not sure if that would make a difference?