Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone,

I have been researching and investing in Bitcoin the last 3 years, but have more recently been interested in learning programming for Bitcoin.  I recently bought Jimmy Song's book, Programming Bitcoin: Learn How to Program Bitcoin from Scratch.

I am working on installing all the necessary programs and environment to do the exercises for the book (as listed on pages xv and xvi in the preface). I copied and pasted the code as listed in the book and on the github website:

https://github.com/jimmysong/programmingbitcoin


I was able to successfully complete steps 1-6 on my MacOs, but when I tried to do step 7, I got the following in my Terminal:

Andrews-MacBook-Air:~ andrew$ pip install virtualenv --user
Requirement already satisfied: virtualenv in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (20.14.1)
Requirement already satisfied: importlib-metadata>=0.12 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from virtualenv) (4.8.3)
Requirement already satisfied: filelock<4,>=3.2 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from virtualenv) (3.4.1)
Requirement already satisfied: distlib<1,>=0.3.1 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from virtualenv) (0.3.4)
Requirement already satisfied: importlib-resources>=1.0 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from virtualenv) (5.4.0)
Requirement already satisfied: platformdirs<3,>=2 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from virtualenv) (2.4.0)
Requirement already satisfied: six<2,>=1.9.0 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from virtualenv) (1.16.0)
Requirement already satisfied: typing-extensions>=3.6.4 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from importlib-metadata>=0.12->virtualenv) (4.1.1)
Requirement already satisfied: zipp>=0.5 in ./Library/Python/3.6/lib/python/site-packages (from importlib-metadata>=0.12->virtualenv) (3.6.0)
Andrews-MacBook-Air:~ andrew$ virtualenv -p python3 .venv
-bash: virtualenv: command not found
Andrews-MacBook-Air:~ andrew$

I don't know much about programming and would appreciate any feedback for troubleshooting with this so I can progress through the rest of the book. I searched on my web browser and youtube, but didn't find any troubleshooting advice specific to this problem.

I primarily need help with steps 7 and 8 for setting up my laptop to do the chapters and assignments. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Edit: looking back at it once more could you run "python -m virtualenv" and see what that does? I think I remember esolving a problem similar to this on Debian by writing it that way instead.

I wrote a solution too quickly and it was just suggesting you do step 6.

Could you run pip install venv and use that instead of virtualenv (according to stackoverflow it should be built into python 3)? That can be used and activated the same way I think.

Thanks for the assistance and suggestions.  I tried to install it as: pip install venv (as you suggested) and got the following:

ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement venv (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for venv

It's because it already comes with python.

You just need to run python - m venv .venv and follow the rest of the instructions.

thanks for your help.  I am going to do some more research with virtualenv for python to get a better grasp of the basic concepts.