Installation

Requirements

Soft Potato requires Python 3.10 or higher. We recommend using a virtual environment (such as venv or conda) to manage dependencies:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

Chip's Tip: Why Use a Virtual Environment?

Installing scientific packages inside a dedicated .venv keeps your project dependencies isolated and reproducible without requiring sudo or modifying your operating system's Python installation.

Stable Release (PyPI)

The recommended way to install the latest stable version of Soft Potato is via PyPI using pip:

pip install softpotato

To upgrade an existing installation to the latest stable release:

pip install --upgrade softpotato

Verify your installation by printing the installed version:

python -c "import softpotato as sp; print(sp.__version__)"

Bleeding Edge (GitHub)

To access the latest features, active development, and unreleased bug fixes, you can install the bleeding-edge version directly from the GitHub repository:

pip install git+https://github.com/oliverrdz/softpotato.git

To update your bleeding-edge installation to the latest commit on main:

pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/oliverrdz/softpotato.git

You can also target a specific branch or tag if desired:

pip install git+https://github.com/oliverrdz/softpotato.git@main

From Source (Development)

If you plan to contribute to Soft Potato or modify the source code, clone the repository and install it in editable mode with development and documentation dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/oliverrdz/softpotato.git
cd softpotato
pip install -e ".[dev,docs]"

Available optional dependency extras defined in pyproject.toml:

• [test]: Dependencies for running tests (pytest, pytest-cov, nbmake).
• [docs]: Dependencies for building the documentation (mkdocs, mkdocs-material, mkdocstrings[python], mkdocs-jupyter).
• [dev]: All development tools including tests, linters (ruff, mypy), and documentation builders.