Installation¶
The easiest way for the majority of users to install pandas is to install it as part of the Anaconda distribution, a cross platform distribution for data analysis and scientific computing. This is the recommended installation method for most users.
Instructions for installing from source, PyPI, various Linux distributions, or a development version are also provided.
Python version support¶
Officially Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4.
Installing pandas¶
Trying out pandas, no installation required!¶
The easiest way to start experimenting with pandas doesn’t involve installing pandas at all.
Wakari is a free service that provides a hosted IPython Notebook service in the cloud.
Simply create an account, and have access to pandas from within your brower via an IPython Notebook in a few minutes.
Installing pandas with Anaconda¶
Installing pandas and the rest of the NumPy and SciPy stack can be a little difficult for inexperienced users.
The simplest way to install not only pandas, but Python and the most popular packages that make up the SciPy stack (IPython, NumPy, Matplotlib, ...) is with Anaconda, a cross-platform (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows) Python distribution for data analytics and scientific computing.
After running a simple installer, the user will have access to pandas and the rest of the SciPy stack without needing to install anything else, and without needing to wait for any software to be compiled.
Installation instructions for Anaconda can be found here.
A full list of the packages available as part of the Anaconda distribution can be found here.
An additional advantage of installing with Anaconda is that you don’t require admin rights to install it, it will install in the user’s home directory, and this also makes it trivial to delete Anaconda at a later date (just delete that folder).
Installing pandas with Miniconda¶
The previous section outlined how to get pandas installed as part of the Anaconda distribution. However this approach means you will install well over one hundred packages and involves downloading the installer which is a few hundred megabytes in size.
If you want to have more control on which packages, or have a limited internet bandwidth, then installing pandas with Miniconda may be a better solution.
Conda is the package manager that the Anaconda distribution is built upon. It is a package manager that is both cross-platform and language agnostic (it can play a similar role to a pip and virtualenv combination).
Miniconda allows you to create a minimal self contained Python installation, and then use the Conda command to install additional packages.
First you will need Conda to be installed and downloading and running the Miniconda will do this for you. The installer can be found here
The next step is to create a new conda environment (these are analogous to a virtualenv but they also allow you to specify precisely which Python version to install also). Run the following commands from a terminal window:
conda create -n name_of_my_env python
This will create a minimal environment with only Python installed in it. To put your self inside this environment run:
source activate name_of_my_env
On Windows the command is:
activate name_of_my_env
The final step required is to install pandas. This can be done with the following command:
conda install pandas
To install a specific pandas version:
conda install pandas=0.13.1
To install other packages, IPython for example:
conda install ipython
To install the full Anaconda distribution:
conda install anaconda
If you require any packages that are available to pip but not conda, simply install pip, and use pip to install these packages:
conda install pip
pip install django
Installing from PyPI¶
pandas can be installed via pip from PyPI.
pip install pandas
This will likely require the installation of a number of dependencies, including NumPy, will require a compiler to compile required bits of code, and can take a few minutes to complete.
Installing using your Linux distribution’s package manager.¶
| Distribution | Status | Download / Repository Link | Install method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian | stable | official Debian repository | sudo apt-get install python-pandas |
| Debian & Ubuntu | unstable (latest packages) | NeuroDebian | sudo apt-get install python-pandas |
| Ubuntu | stable | official Ubuntu repository | sudo apt-get install python-pandas |
| Ubuntu | unstable (daily builds) | PythonXY PPA; activate by: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pythonxy/pythonxy-devel && sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get install python-pandas |
| OpenSuse & Fedora | stable | OpenSuse Repository | zypper in python-pandas |
Installing from source¶
Note
Installing from the git repository requires a recent installation of Cython as the cythonized C sources are no longer checked into source control. Released source distributions will contain the built C files. I recommend installing the latest Cython via easy_install -U Cython
The source code is hosted at http://github.com/pydata/pandas, it can be checked out using git and compiled / installed like so:
git clone git://github.com/pydata/pandas.git
cd pandas
python setup.py install
Make sure you have Cython installed when installing from the repository, rather then a tarball or pypi.
On Windows, I suggest installing the MinGW compiler suite following the directions linked to above. Once configured property, run the following on the command line:
python setup.py build --compiler=mingw32
python setup.py install
Note that you will not be able to import pandas if you open an interpreter in the source directory unless you build the C extensions in place:
python setup.py build_ext --inplace
The most recent version of MinGW (any installer dated after 2011-08-03) has removed the ‘-mno-cygwin’ option but Distutils has not yet been updated to reflect that. Thus, you may run into an error like “unrecognized command line option ‘-mno-cygwin’”. Until the bug is fixed in Distutils, you may need to install a slightly older version of MinGW (2011-08-02 installer).
Running the test suite¶
pandas is equipped with an exhaustive set of unit tests covering about 97% of the codebase as of this writing. To run it on your machine to verify that everything is working (and you have all of the dependencies, soft and hard, installed), make sure you have nose and run:
$ nosetests pandas
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 818 tests in 21.631s
OK (SKIP=2)
Dependencies¶
NumPy: 1.7.0 or higher
python-dateutil 1.5 or higher
- pytz
- Needed for time zone support
Recommended Dependencies¶
- numexpr: for accelerating certain numerical operations. numexpr uses multiple cores as well as smart chunking and caching to achieve large speedups. If installed, must be Version 2.1 or higher.
- bottleneck: for accelerating certain types of nan evaluations. bottleneck uses specialized cython routines to achieve large speedups.
Note
You are highly encouraged to install these libraries, as they provide large speedups, especially if working with large data sets.
Optional Dependencies¶
Cython: Only necessary to build development version. Version 0.19.1 or higher.
SciPy: miscellaneous statistical functions
PyTables: necessary for HDF5-based storage. Version 3.0.0 or higher required.
SQLAlchemy: for SQL database support. Version 0.8.1 or higher recommended.
matplotlib: for plotting
- statsmodels
- Needed for parts of pandas.stats
- XlsxWriter
- Alternative Excel writer.
boto: necessary for Amazon S3 access.
One of PyQt4, PySide, pygtk, xsel, or xclip: necessary to use read_clipboard(). Most package managers on Linux distributions will have xclip and/or xsel immediately available for installation.
Google’s python-gflags and google-api-python-client
- Needed for gbq
- setuptools
- Needed for gbq (specifically, it utilizes pkg_resources)
- httplib2
- Needed for gbq
One of the following combinations of libraries is needed to use the top-level read_html() function:
- BeautifulSoup4 and html5lib (Any recent version of html5lib is okay.)
- BeautifulSoup4 and lxml
- BeautifulSoup4 and html5lib and lxml
- Only lxml, although see HTML reading gotchas for reasons as to why you should probably not take this approach.
Warning
if you install BeautifulSoup4 you must install either lxml or html5lib or both. read_html() will not work with only BeautifulSoup4 installed.
You are highly encouraged to read HTML reading gotchas. It explains issues surrounding the installation and usage of the above three libraries
- You may need to install an older version of BeautifulSoup4:
- Versions 4.2.1, 4.1.3 and 4.0.2 have been confirmed for 64 and 32-bit Ubuntu/Debian
Additionally, if you’re using Anaconda you should definitely read the gotchas about HTML parsing libraries
Note
if you’re on a system with apt-get you can do
sudo apt-get build-dep python-lxml
to get the necessary dependencies for installation of lxml. This will prevent further headaches down the line.
Note
Without the optional dependencies, many useful features will not work. Hence, it is highly recommended that you install these. A packaged distribution like Enthought Canopy may be worth considering.