# Installation

Before you start, you'll need to setup your environment and install the appropriate packages. `timm` is tested on **Python 3+**.

## Virtual Environment

You should install `timm` in a [virtual environment](https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html) to keep things tidy and avoid dependency conflicts.

1. Create and navigate to your project directory:

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

2. Start a virtual environment inside your 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've created your virtual environment, you can install `timm` in it.

## Using pip

The most straightforward way to install `timm` is with pip:

```bash
pip install timm
```

Alternatively, you can install `timm` from GitHub directly to get the latest, bleeding-edge version:

```bash
pip install git+https://github.com/rwightman/pytorch-image-models.git
```

Run the following command to check if `timm` has been properly installed:

```bash
python -c "from timm import list_models; print(list_models(pretrained=True)[:5])"
```

This command lists the first five pretrained models available in `timm` (which are sorted alphebetically). You should see the following output:

```python
['adv_inception_v3', 'bat_resnext26ts', 'beit_base_patch16_224', 'beit_base_patch16_224_in22k', 'beit_base_patch16_384']
```

## From Source

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

```bash
git clone https://github.com/rwightman/pytorch-image-models.git
cd timm
pip install -e .
```

Again, you can check if `timm` was properly installed with the following command:

```bash
python -c "from timm import list_models; print(list_models(pretrained=True)[:5])"
```