Installation¶
Requirements¶
Astropy has the following strict requirements:
Astropy also depends on other packages for optional features:
- scipy: To power a variety of features in several modules.
- h5py: To read/write
Table
objects from/to HDF5 files. - BeautifulSoup: To read
Table
objects from HTML files. - bleach: Used to sanitize text when
disabling HTML escaping in the
Table
HTML writer. - PyYAML: To read/write
Table
objects from/to the Enhanced CSV ASCII table format and to serialize mixins for various formats. - xmllint: To validate VOTABLE XML files. This is a command line tool installed outside of Python.
- pandas: To read/write
Table
objects from/to pandas DataFrame objects. - bintrees for faster
FastRBT
andFastBST
indexing engines withTable
, although these will still be slower in most cases than the default indexing engine. - sortedcontainers for faster
SCEngine
indexing engine withTable
, although this may still be slower in some cases than the default indexing engine. - pytz: To specify and convert between timezones.
- jplephem: To retrieve JPL ephemeris of Solar System objects.
- matplotlib 2.0 or later: To provide plotting
functionality that
astropy.visualization
enhances. - scikit-image: To downsample a data array in
astropy.nddata.utils
. - setuptools: Used for discovery of
entry points which are used to insert fitters into
astropy.modeling.fitting
. - mpmath: Used for the ‘kraft-burrows-nousek’
interval in
poisson_conf_interval
. - asdf 2.3 or later: Enables the serialization of various Astropy classes into a portable, hierarchical, human-readable representation.
- bottleneck: Improves the performance of sigma-clipping and other functionality that may required computing statistics on arrays with NaN values.
And the following packages can optionally be used when testing:
- pytest-astropy: See Testing a source code build of Astropy
- pytest-xdist: Used for distributed testing.
- pytest-mpl: Used for testing with Matplotlib figures.
- objgraph: Used only in tests to test for reference leaks.
- IPython: Used for testing notebook interface of
Table
. - coverage: Used for code coverage measurements.
- skyfield: Used for testing Solar System coordinates.
However, note that these only need to be installed if those particular features are needed. Astropy will import even if these dependencies are not installed.
Installing Astropy¶
Using pip¶
Warning
Users of the Anaconda python distribution should follow the instructions for Using conda.
To install Astropy with pip, simply run:
pip install astropy
If you want to make sure none of your existing dependencies get upgraded, you can also do:
pip install astropy --no-deps
On the other hand, if you want to install Astropy along with all the available optional depdendencies, you can do:
pip install astropy[all]
Note that you will need a C compiler (e.g. gcc
or clang
) to be installed
(see Building from source below) for the installation to succeed.
If you get a PermissionError
this means that you do not have the required
administrative access to install new packages to your Python installation. In
this case you may consider using the --user
option to install the package
into your home directory. You can read more about how to do this in the pip
documentation.
Alternatively, if you intend to do development on other software that uses Astropy, such as an affiliated package, consider installing Astropy into a virtualenv.
Do not install Astropy or other third-party packages using sudo
unless you are fully aware of the risks.
Using conda¶
Astropy is installed by default with the Anaconda Distribution. To update to the latest version run:
conda update astropy
There may be a delay of a day or two between when a new version of Astropy
is released and when a package is available for Anaconda. You can check
for the list of available versions with conda search astropy
.
Warning
Attempting to use pip to upgrade your installation of Astropy may result in a corrupted installation.
Testing an installed Astropy¶
The easiest way to test your installed version of astropy is running correctly is to use the astropy.test() function:
import astropy
astropy.test()
The tests should run and print out any failures, which you can report at the Astropy issue tracker.
This way of running the tests may not work if you do it in the astropy source distribution. See Testing a source code build of Astropy for how to run the tests from the source code directory, or Running Tests for more details.
Building from source¶
Prerequisites¶
You will need a compiler suite and the development headers for Python and Numpy in order to build Astropy.
If you are building the latest developer version rather than using a stable release, you will also need Cython (v0.21 or later) and jinja2 (v2.7 or later) installed (the released packages have the necessary C files packaged with them, and hence do not require Cython).
Prerequisites for Linux¶
On Linux, using the package manager for your distribution will usually be the easiest route to making sure you have the pre-requisites to build Astropy. In order to build from source, you’ll need the python development package for your Linux distribution.
For Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-dev
For Fedora/RHEL:
sudo yum install python-devel
Prerequisites for Mac OS X¶
On MacOS X you will need the XCode command line tools which can be installed using:
xcode-select --install
Follow the onscreen instructions to install the command line tools required. Note that you do not need to install the full XCode distribution (assuming you are using MacOS X 10.9 or later).
The instructions for building Numpy from source are a good resource for setting up your environment to build Python packages.
Obtaining the source packages¶
Source packages¶
The latest stable source package for Astropy can be downloaded here.
Development repository¶
The latest development version of Astropy can be cloned from github using this command:
git clone --recursive git://github.com/astropy/astropy.git
If you wish to participate in the development of Astropy, see Developer Documentation. This document covers only the basics necessary to install Astropy.
Building and Installing¶
Astropy uses the Python built-in distutils framework for building and installing and requires the setuptools package.
If Numpy is not already installed in your Python environment, the astropy setup process will try to download and install it before continuing to install astropy.
To build and install Astropy (from the root of the source tree):
pip install .
If you install in this way, if you make changes to the code, you will need to re-run the install command for changes to be reflected. Alternatively, you can use:
pip install -e .
Which installs astropy in develop/editable mode, which means that changes in the code are immediately reflected in the installed version.
Troubleshooting¶
If you get an error mentioning that you do not have the correct permissions to
install Astropy into the default site-packages
directory, you can try
installing with:
pip install . --user
which will install into a default directory in your home directory.
External C libraries¶
The Astropy source ships with the C source code of a number of
libraries. By default, these internal copies are used to build
Astropy. However, if you wish to use the system-wide installation of
one of those libraries, you can pass one or more of the
--use-system-X
flags to the setup.py build
command.
For example, to build Astropy using the system libexpat, use:
python setup.py build --use-system-expat
To build using all of the system libraries, use:
python setup.py build --use-system-libraries
To see which system libraries Astropy knows how to build against, use:
python setup.py build --help
As with all distutils commandline options, they may also be provided in a
setup.cfg
in the same directory as setup.py
. For example, to use
the system libexpat, add the following to the
setup.cfg
file:
[build]
use_system_expat=1
The C libraries currently bundled with Astropy include:
Installing Astropy into CASA¶
If you want to be able to use Astropy inside CASA, the easiest way is to do so from inside CASA.
First, we need to make sure pip is installed. Start up CASA as normal, and type:
CASA <2>: from setuptools.command import easy_install
CASA <3>: easy_install.main(['--user', 'pip'])
Now, quit CASA and re-open it, then type the following to install Astropy:
CASA <2>: import subprocess, sys
CASA <3>: subprocess.check_call([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'install', 'astropy'])
Then close CASA again and open it, and you should be able to import Astropy:
CASA <2>: import astropy
Any astropy affiliated package can be installed the same way (e.g. the spectral-cube or other packages that may be useful for radio astronomy).
Note
The above instructions have not been tested on all systems. We know of a few examples that do work, but that is not a guarantee that this will work on all systems. If you install astropy and begin to encounter issues with CASA, please look at the known CASA issues and, if you don’t encounter your issue there, post a new one.
Building documentation¶
Note
Building the documentation is in general not necessary unless you are writing new documentation or do not have internet access, because the latest (and archive) versions of astropy’s documentation should be available at docs.astropy.org .
Dependencies¶
Building the documentation requires the Astropy source code and some additional packages, including those in Requirements. The easiest way to install the extra dependencies for documentation is to install the sphinx-astropy package, either with pip:
pip install sphinx-astropy
or with conda:
conda install -c astropy sphinx-astropy
In addition to providing configuration common to packages in the Astropy ecosystem, this package also serves as a way to automatically get the main dependencies, including:
- Sphinx - the main package we use to build the documentation.
- astropy-sphinx-theme - the default ‘bootstrap’ theme use by Astropy and a number of affiliated packages.
- sphinx-automodapi - an extension that makes it easy to automatically generate API documentation.
- sphinx-gallery - an extension to generate example galleries
- numpydoc - an extension to parse docstrings in NumpyDoc format
- pillow - used in one of the examples
In addition, if you want inheritance graphs to be generated, you will need to make sure that Graphviz is installed. If you install sphinx-astropy with conda, graphviz will automatically get installed, but if you use pip, you will need to install Graphviz separately as it isn’t a Python package.
Building¶
There are two ways to build the Astropy documentation. The most straightforward way is to execute the command (from the astropy source directory):
python setup.py build_docs
The documentation will be built in the docs/_build/html
directory, and can
be read by pointing a web browser to docs/_build/html/index.html
.
The LaTeX documentation can be generated by using the command:
python setup.py build_docs -b latex
The LaTeX file Astropy.tex
will be created in the docs/_build/latex
directory, and can be compiled using pdflatex
.
The above method builds the API documentation from the source code. Alternatively, you can do:
cd docs
make html
And the documentation will be generated in the same location, but using the installed version of Astropy.
Reporting issues/requesting features¶
As mentioned above, building the documentation depends on a number of sphinx extensions and other packages. Since it isn’t necessarily straightforward to know which package is causing issues or would need to have a new feature implemented, you can simply open an issue in the core astropy package issue tracker. However, if you wish you can also open issues in the repositories for some of the dependencies:
- For requests/issues related to the appearance of the docs (e.g. related to the CSS), you can open an issue in the astropy-sphinx-theme issue tracker.
- For requests/issues related to the auto-generated API docs which appear to be general issues rather than an issue with a specific docstring, you can use the sphinx-automodapi issue tracker.
- For issues related to the default configuration (e.g which extensions are enabled by default), you can use the sphinx-astropy issue tracker.
Testing a source code build of Astropy¶
Before running tests, it is necessary to make sure that Astropy’s test dependencies are installed. This can be done with the following command:
pip install pytest-astropy
More information on what the pytest-astropy
package provides can be found
in Testing Dependencies.
The easiest way to test that your Astropy built correctly (without installing astropy) is to run this from the root of the source tree:
python setup.py test
There are also alternative methods of Running Tests. Note that you will need pytest to be installed for this to work.