⚠️ Warning: running OpenFisca on a machine with administrator privileges would be much easier. Using MacOS or Linux would be even better.
If you do not have a choice other than using a restricted Windows, this guide sums up one “recipe” to install OpenFisca in such an environment.
The following steps are shared as an example of the process and were written for an old OpenFisca-France revision (v.18.9.10).
Git is a tool that will help you version your work. It also comes with a shell terminal that allows you to type commands in a more standard way than the Windows command line tool.
Download git from https://gitforwindows.org/.
Install it. While installing, keep the default options.
Python is the programming language used in OpenFisca. It can be installed without administrator rights through a software named Miniconda.
Download miniconda from the official website. Make sure to choose the country package Python version for Windows. If you don’t know if your system is 32-bit or 64-bit, pick 32-bit.
Install it. At some point, the installer will ask you for a “Destination Folder”. You can keep the default or choose another one, but in all cases copy and paste the path to this folder somewhere. It will be useful later. For instance, this path may look like C:\Users\my-name\AppData\Local\Miniconda2.
Run the program “Git Bash” from the “Start” menu. This should open a command line. Copy and paste the following lines in the console, be sure to adapt the first line using the path you noted in the last step and set the python version to the correct one (set to 3.11 here):
echo 'MINICONDA_PATH="C:\Users\form\AppData\Local\Miniconda2"' >> .bashrc
echo 'function convert { echo /$1 | sed '\''s/\\/\//g'\'' | sed '\''s/://'\'' ; }' >> .bashrc
echo 'function add { export PATH=$(convert $1):$PATH ;}' >> .bashrc
echo 'add $MINICONDA_PATH' >> .bashrc
echo 'add "$MINICONDA_PATH/Scripts"' >> .bashrc
source .bashrc
conda create -n openfisca python=3.7 --offline --yes
echo 'source activate openfisca' >> .bashrc
source activate openfisca
To check that everything worked correctly, type in Git Bash:
pip --version
A version number should be printed, and no error message should appear. This indicates a functional Python working environment!
For this example, we will utilise the OpenFisca-France package. For a different model you could achieve the same result by following the offline environment example to get local copies of the required packages.
Download the country package installation files: OpenFisca package + dependencies. Here is an example with OpenFisca-France v.18.9.10 files
Extract the content of this archive in a directory.
Go to that directory, then to the windows subdirectory. If you installed Python in 32 bits, right-click on 32-bits. If you installed Python in 64 bits, right-click on the 64-bits subdirectory. Choose “Git Bash Here”
Run the command pip install *
To check that everything works correctly, run the following command in Git Bash:
python -c "from openfisca_france import CountryTaxBenefitSystem; CountryTaxBenefitSystem()"
No error message should appear. If that is the case the country package is successfully installed.
Atom is a modern text editor that doesn’t require administrator privileges to be installed. It will allow you to edit Python files with syntaxing colouring.
Download atom from https://atom.io/
You can now write your own scripts, such as this tutorial.
To edit a script, open it with atom.
To run it, save your modifications, go to the directory containing it, right click and choose “Git Bash Here”. Then type:
python name-of-the-script.py
In case you run into a problem, please open an issue on the appropriate OpenFisca country repository, or if you can determine the issue is in OpenFisca Core, open an issue here.