How to use a framework build of Python with Anacon

Question

I'm unable to get matplotlib animations to display on a Mac computer. I've chased down several attempts at installing ffmpeg but they've all failed and I'm starting to wonder if that isn't the wrong way to solve the problem.

I found this page.

Since I'm running Python from the Spyder app in Anaconda, the section for this seems relevant. It says

The default python provided in (Ana)Conda is not a framework build. However, the Conda developers have made it easy to install a framework build in both the main environment and in Conda envs. To use this install python.app conda install python.app and use pythonw rather than python

I'm not perfectly clear on what this means, but I opened a terminal, ran conda install python.app and it seemed to work--at least there were no error messages. I could navigate to a folder that contained the file python.app.

I'm not clear on what it means to "use pythonw" but I navigated to the animation I'm trying to compile and ran $ pythonw anim.py and it gave me an I/O error. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to use pythonw in some other way, or what. If I restart and try to run the code in Spyder I get the same error as before.

I know that the code works, because I've run it on a Linux machine that has ffmpeg and it worked.

Is there something else I need to do to get a framework build, whatever that means?

Answer 1

After installing the framework build, you have to change the location of your python interpreter from python to pythonw. I am not familiar with Spyder, but in VS code I solved this issue modifying the settings.json file from

{
    "python.pythonPath": "/Users/[username]/miniconda3/envs/base-evn/bin/python"
}

to

{
    "python.pythonPath": "/Users/[username]/miniconda3/envs/base-evn/bin/pythonw"
}

I am using minicoda. For anaconda, the folder in your home directory might be named one of the following:

anaconda2. anaconda3.