# Installation

Before you start, you will need to setup your environment and install the appropriate packages. 🤗 Evaluate is tested on **Python 3.7+**.

## Virtual environment

You should install 🤗 Evaluate in a [virtual environment](https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html) to keep everything neat and tidy.

1. Create and navigate to your project directory:

   ```bash
   mkdir ~/my-project
   cd ~/my-project
   ```

2. Start a virtual environment inside the directory:

   ```bash
   python -m venv .env
   ```

3. Activate and deactivate the virtual environment with the following commands:

   ```bash
   # Activate the virtual environment
   source .env/bin/activate
   
   # Deactivate the virtual environment
   source .env/bin/deactivate
   ```

Once you have created your virtual environment, you can install 🤗 Evaluate in it.

## pip

The most straightforward way to install 🤗 Evaluate is with pip:

```bash
pip install evaluate
```

Run the following command to check if 🤗 Evaluate has been properly installed:

```bash
python -c "import evaluate; print(evaluate.load('exact_match').compute(references=['hello'], predictions=['hello']))"
```

This should return:

```bash
{'exact_match': 1.0}
```

## source

Building 🤗 Evaluate from source lets you make changes to the code base. To install from source, clone the repository and install with the following commands:

```bash
git clone https://github.com/huggingface/evaluate.git
cd evaluate
pip install -e .
```

Again, you can check if 🤗 Evaluate has been properly installed with:

```bash
python -c "import evaluate; print(evaluate.load('exact_match').compute(references=['hello'], predictions=['hello']))"
```

