Installation#

Requirements#

Photutils has the following strict requirements:

Photutils also optionally depends on other packages for some features:

  • Matplotlib 3.7 or later: Used to power a variety of plotting features (e.g., plotting apertures).

  • Regions 0.9 or later: Required to perform aperture photometry using region objects.

  • scikit-image 0.20 or later: Required to deblend segmented sources.

  • GWCS 0.20 or later: Required in make_gwcs to create a simple celestial gwcs object.

  • Bottleneck: Improves the performance of sigma clipping and other functionality that may require computing statistics on arrays with NaN values.

  • tqdm: Required to display optional progress bars.

  • Rasterio: Required to convert source segments into polygon objects.

  • Shapely: Required to convert source segments into polygon objects.

Installing the latest released version#

Using pip#

To install Photutils with pip, run:

pip install photutils

If you want to install Photutils along with all of its optional dependencies, you can instead run:

pip install "photutils[all]"

In most cases, this will install a pre-compiled version (called a wheel) of Photutils, but if you are using a very recent version of Python or if you are installing Photutils on a platform that is not common, Photutils will be installed from a source file. In this case you will need a C compiler (e.g., gcc or clang) to be installed for the installation to succeed (see Building from Source prerequisites).

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.

Using conda#

Photutils can also be installed using the conda package manager. There are several methods for installing conda and many different ways to set up your Python environment, but that is beyond the scope of this documentation. We recommend installing miniforge.

Once you have installed conda, you can install Photutils using the conda-forge channel:

conda install -c conda-forge photutils

Building from Source#

Prerequisites#

You will need a compiler suite and the development headers for Python and Numpy in order to build Photutils from the source distribution. You do not need to install any other specific build dependencies (such as Cython) since these will be automatically installed into a temporary build environment by pip.

On Linux, using the package manager for your distribution will usually be the easiest route.

On macOS 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).

Installing the development version#

Photutils is being developed on GitHub. The latest development version of the Photutils source code can be retrieved using git:

git clone https://github.com/astropy/photutils.git

Then to build and install Photutils (with all of its optional dependencies), run:

cd photutils
pip install ".[all]"

If you wish to install the package in “editable” mode, instead include the “-e” option:

pip install -e ".[all]"

Alternatively, pip can be used to retrieve and install the latest development pre-built wheel:

pip install --upgrade --extra-index-url https://pypi.anaconda.org/astropy/simple "photutils[all]" --pre

Testing an installed Photutils#

To test your installed version of Photutils, you can run the test suite using the pytest command. Running the test suite requires installing the pytest-astropy (0.11 or later) package.

To run the test suite, use the following command:

pytest --pyargs photutils

Any test failures can be reported to the Photutils issue tracker.