As we have mentioned, you can install a package from GitHub and it will behave the same as any other installed package—it can be upgraded or uninstalled.

Often, however, you will want to use a package while developing it. It would be hard to do both in the normal installation routine; you'd have to either update or re-install the package every time you made any developmental changes, just to reflect those changes. To get around this, there is a great feature that keeps the advantages of both worlds—your code is treated as a package but can be easily modified in place. This feature is called editable mode. Essentially, it means the folder on your filesystem is registered as a package, and so the imported package will always reflect all the changes that you've made.

In order to reap these benefits, you have to have a repository of the package in question on your local machine. We obviously have our package, but it is also easy to pull the raw code via git clone my/package/url. Next, you open the terminal, and while being one step above the package folder, you type the following:

pip install -e wikiwwii

Boom! You have an editable package. You can test it in your Jupyter Notebook:

>>> import wikiwwii  

See? It behaves as if it is a properly installed package but you can make changes to your code and they will be immediately applied upon your next import.

This section helped you to install a package in editable mode, so now we should be good to try out some new code files!