Installing OpenCV in a conda environment

In a terminal, navigate to the directory where you downloaded the code:

$ cd Desktop/opencv-machine-learning

Before we create a new conda environment, we want to make sure we added the Conda-Forge channel to our list of trusted conda channels:

$ conda config --add channels conda-forge

The Conda-Forge channel is led by an open-source community that provides a wide variety of code recipes and software packages (for more info, see https://conda-forge.github.io). Specifically, it provides an OpenCV package for 64-bit Windows, which will simplify the remaining steps of the installation.

Then run the following command to create a conda environment based on Python 3.5, which will also install all the necessary packages listed in the file requirements.txt in one fell swoop:

$ conda create -n Python3 python=3.5 --file requirements.txt

To activate the environment, type one of the following, depending on your platform:

$ source activate Python3  # on Linux / Mac OS X
$ activate Python3         # on Windows

Once we close the terminal, the session will be deactivated--so we will have to run this last command again the next time we open a terminal. We can also deactivate the environment by hand:

$ source deactivate  # on Linux / Mac OS X
$ deactivate         # on Windows

And done!