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Exercise

Add packages and commands

Now the you have initialized the mortgage_rates project, it's time to add packages, downloads, and commands.

Instructions 1/5
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  • 1

    Now it's time to add the required packages to the project and prepare the environment. This Python 3 based project will need to install Pandas for data processing and statsmodels to fit the autoregressive model and make predictions.

    All other dependencies of these packages, like NumPy and Scipy will be installed automatically. Run anaconda-project add-packages <package-names> with the following

    • python=3
    • pandas
    • statsmodels
    • 2

      Now it's time to add the URL to download the 30-year mortgage rates. In a project, files are downloaded automatically when a command is run. A download is defined through the add-download command which takes two arguments. 

      anaconda-project add-download <ENV_VARIABLE> <DOWNLOAD_URL>

      The first argument <ENV_VARIABLE> is the shell variable name for the downloaded file and the second argument <DOWNLOAD_URL> is the full URL to the file.

      Your job is to add a download for https://goo.gl/jpbAsR with the variable name MORTGAGE_RATES. The link has been shortened for convenience.

    • 3

      In order to use the mortgage rates CSV file that will be automatically downloaded by Anaconda Project we have to access the MORTGAGE_RATES environment variable from our Python code. The file forecast.py is now in your mortgage_rates project directory. Edit the file so that line 9 reads

      MORTGAGE_RATES = os.environ["MORTGAGE_RATES"]

      This line uses the os Python module to access environment variables from the system shell.

      You can use nano, vi, vim, or emacs to the edit the file.

    • 4

      The script file is now ready and the next step is to register it as a command in your project. The script file is intended to be run as a command line tool and must be declared a Unix command with --type unix. Here's the anaconda-project command.

      anaconda-project add-command [flags] <name> <command-to-execute>

      The <name> is forecast and the <command-to-execute> is "python forecast.py".

    • 5

      The project has now been completely specified and you can run the forecast command using anaconda-project run as you did before.

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