July 09, 2015

1 min

As a Linux user the installation of all deps is rather easy; you run a couple of apt-get installs and some pip installs inside a virtual env and your are good to go. On windows there are some steps you need to do by hand. Normally I like to compile my own C extensions where possible, but after 2 tries I gave up on that as you need to have a rather complex setup. Python 3.5 seems to solve this by allowing you to compile C extensions with another compiler versions then the one used to compile the used python version itself. So for now I sticked to using some binaries.

Step 1: Install Python3.4

I used the 64-bit MSI installer from https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-343/. You can use the installer to add Python to your Path or do it by hand: C:Python34;C:Python34Scripts;

Step 2: Create a virtualenv

As of Python3.3 venv is part of Python itself! So go ahead and create a virtualenv for your django project somewhere. I personally like to have my virtualenvs in a folder in my home dir: .virtualenvs ->

You can now activate your virtual env by navigating to .virtualenvs/django1.8-project/bin and run activate.bat

Step 3: Download a Psycopg2 binary

Psycopg2 is one of the difficult packages in a modern django stack. With python27 you could compile it yourself relatively easy by using the Microsofot Visual Studio Python Redistributable; but this is bound to python 2.7.

Download the version you want: latest at the moment of writing or choose your own version: http://www.stickpeople.com/projects/python/win-psycopg/

Look inside the requirements.txt for a given project if you want to know which PSycopg version you need.

Now activate your virtualenv and install it with:

You can now proceed installing other packages, assuming no further C extensions are listed in the requirement.txt