Installation Details
Installing Python
The easiest way to install Python on your system is via Anaconda. To check if the system has a Python distribution installed, open a terminal window and run:
python --version
or for Python 3 specifically:
python3 --version
Opening a Terminal Window
On Windows, press the Windows key and search for “PowerShell”. On macOS, press Cmd + Space and search for “Terminal”.
Creating a Virtual environment
If Python was installed via Anaconda, a virtual environment can be created via the Terminal with conda:
conda create -n mexca-venv 'Python<3.10'
Then, activate the environment with:
conda activate mexca-venv
Alternatively, you can create a virtual environment with venv:
python -m venv mexca-venv
On Windows, the venv environment can be activated with:
mexca-venv\Scripts\activate
On macOS and Linux, run:
source mexca-venv/bin/activate
Installation
Before installing mexca, make sure, all other Requirements are installed.
After creating and activating the virtual environment, run pip install mexca
in the Terminal to install the mexca base package from PyPI.
This will only install the dependencies of the base package. The pipeline components can still be run as Docker containers.
Note
This setup requires that Docker is installed on your system.
To run the components without containers, their additional dependencies must be installed via:
pip install mexca[vid,spe,voi,tra,sen]
The abbreviations indicate:
vid: FaceExtractor
spe: SpeakerIdentifier
voi: VoiceExtractor
tra: AudioTranscriber
sen: SentimentExtractor
Note
It is also possible to run some pipeline components with containers and others without.
For example, the requirements for only the FaceExtractor can be installed via pip install mexca[vid]
Installing the Development Version
For the latest features and bug fixes, the development version of mexca can be installed from GitHub (requires Git) via:
pip install git+https://github.com/mexca/mexca.git
This command will install the latest developments of mexca on the main branch.
Running Example Notebooks
The mexca GitHub repository contains Jupyter notebooks with examples. This requires that Jupyter is installed, which can be done via:
pip install notebook
To run notebooks in your virtual environment, ipykernel also needs to be installed:
pip install ipykernel
Clone the repository with Git:
git clone https://github.com/mexca/mexca.git
cd mexca # go to package directory
To start Jupyter, run:
jupyter notebook
Select an example notebook in the examples/
folder.
Installation on M1 Devices
PyTorch offers beta support for M1 devices since version 1.13. mexca, however, specifies PyTorch version 1.12 as a requirement for its components. To run mexca on M1 devices, upgrading PyTorch to 1.13 is a potential solution, but currently not tested regularly. This can be done via:
pip install torch==1.13
Note
Currently, components cannot be run as containers on M1 devices.