Installation and verifying setup for Python + GIS¶
Note
In the University computer lab you DO NOT have to install Anaconda or Miniconda or any other Python distribution. If you are attending the course in the University computer lab, please jump to Verifying the installation This section only for general info if you want to install Python on your own computer, and for remote students.
Install Python + GIS on Windows¶
How to start doing GIS with Python on a computer?
Well, first you need to install Python and necessary Python modules that are used to perform various GIS-tasks. The purpose of this page is to help you out installing Python and all those modules into your own computer. Even though it is possible to install Python from their homepage, we highly recommend using Miniconda or Anaconda which is an open source distribution of the Python and R programming languages for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment. In short, it makes life much easier when installing new tools on your Python to play with.
Note
Miniconda is an encapsulated versatile virtual python environment installer, that works under the hood of the big Anaconda python distribution. Miniconda is basically a mini version of Anaconda that includes only the conda package manager and its dependencies!
https://conda.io/miniconda.html
Following steps have been tested to work on Windows 7 and 10 with Anaconda/Miniconda 64 bit.
Download Miniconda installer (64 bit) a Python 3.6, 64-bit (exe installer) for Windows.
BEWARE:
- To install miniconda SYSTEM-WIDE for ALL users, this does require administrator permissions; every users can then create their own environments with the conda tool.
- Please do NOT make Conda the default python for the system if you don’t want it to interfere with other Python installations you might have, eg. Pythons of ArcGIS and QGis etc
Install Miniconda on your computer by double clicking the installer and install it into a directory you want.
Install it to all users and use default settings.
Additional install information: https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/install/index.html
Verifying the installation¶
In order to test that the conda package manager works we have to go through a few more steps:
After successful installation you should have a menu entry in the Windows Start Menu:
Anaconda Prompt
This is a Windows CMD (Commandline window, that “knows” about, where your Miniconda/Anaconda installation lies, and where to find the conda tool (without interfering other Python installations on your computer). After it opens it should display somehow like so:
(base) C:\Users\Alexander>
or
(C:\dev\conda3) C:\Users\Alexander>
On the command line type command conda --version in order to see if the command is successful, it should show the version of the conda tool.
(base) C:\Users\Alexander> conda --version
conda 4.5.11
Creating environments and install packages¶
How to use the conda command? Open the Anaconda/conda command prompt from the Start menu:
conda basically represents a typical Python virtualenv command. You can create a several distinct environments, with different Python version, and with different packages to be installed.
This will come in very handy to try out new libraries/packages/tools, without breaking you working installation.
https://conda.io/docs/_downloads/conda-cheatsheet.pdf
We want to use a Python version 3.6 because some of the libraries/tools we want to work with might not yet work with the latest Python 3.7. Here it becomes obvious how practical virtual environments can be. They help you to keep various Python versions around without messing up your system.
(C:\dev\conda3) conda create --name geopython-environment python=3.6
In order to show all environments that have already been created you can ask conda to list these:
(C:\dev\conda3) conda env list
Now we want to activate that environment and start working with it:
(C:\dev\conda3) activate geopython-environment
(geopython-environment)
Install GIS related packages with conda (and pip) by running in command prompt following commands (in the same order as they are listed).
Make sure you are in the correct enviroment (don’t install into base, install new packages ideally only into your designated created environments)
# Install numpy
conda install numpy
# Install pandas
conda install pandas
# Install scipy
conda install scipy
# Install matplotlib
conda install matplotlib
#Install Jupyter Notebook
conda install jupyter
# Install scikit-learn
conda install scikit-learn
# Install statsmodels
conda install statsmodels
# Install Geopandas
conda install -c conda-forge geopandas
# Install cartopy
conda install -c conda-forge cartopy
# Install seaborn
conda install seaborn
# Install geoplot
conda install geoplot
# Install bokeh
conda install bokeh
# Install Folium
conda install -c conda-forge folium
Test that everything works¶
You can test that the installations have worked by running following commands in a Python console. At first start the Python console:
(geopython-environment) python
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import scipy
import statsmodels
import sklearn
import shapely
import geopandas as gpd
import pysal
import bokeh
import cartopy
import geoplot
import folium
If you don’t receive any errors, everything should be working!
Final Remarks¶
We saw that in some installations importing of import matplotlib.pyplot as plt crashed the Python.
If that happens we had success in re-installing matplotlib again: conda install matplotlib.
Furthermore, a warning can appear, that a package (mkl-random) might require “cython” and complain that it is not installed. So far we can ignore that.
Also, a warning occured in some instances that pip was in an older version (9.x) and it was recommended to upgrade pip to a newer version (10.x). The warning shows the command to update pip in this conda environment.
In order to close the Python interpreter type exit() or press Ctrl+Z plus Return to exit.
(geopython-environment) >>> exit()