Installation Instructions

Satpy is available from conda-forge (via conda), PyPI (via pip), or from source (via pip+git). The below instructions show how to install stable versions of Satpy. For a development/unstable version see Development installation.

Conda-based Installation

Satpy can be installed into a conda environment by installing the package from the conda-forge channel. If you do not already have access to a conda installation, we recommend installing miniconda for the smallest and easiest installation.

The commands below will use -c conda-forge to make sure packages are downloaded from the conda-forge channel. Alternatively, you can tell conda to always use conda-forge by running:

$ conda config --add channels conda-forge

In a new conda environment

We recommend creating a separate environment for your work with Satpy. To create a new environment and install Satpy all in one command you can run:

$ conda create -c conda-forge -n my_satpy_env python satpy

You must then activate the environment so any future python or conda commands will use this environment.

$ conda activate my_satpy_env

This method of creating an environment with Satpy (and optionally other packages) installed can generally be created faster than creating an environment and then later installing Satpy and other packages (see the section below).

In an existing environment

Note

It is recommended that when first exploring Satpy, you create a new environment specifically for this rather than modifying one used for other work.

If you already have a conda environment, it is activated, and would like to install Satpy into it, run the following:

$ conda install -c conda-forge satpy

Note

Satpy only automatically installs the dependencies needed to process the most common use cases. Additional dependencies may need to be installed with conda or pip if import errors are encountered. To check your installation use the check_satpy function discussed here.

Pip-based Installation

Satpy is available from the Python Packaging Index (PyPI). A sandbox environment for satpy can be created using Virtualenv.

To install the satpy package and the minimum amount of python dependencies:

$ pip install satpy

Additional dependencies can be installed as “extras” and are grouped by reader, writer, or feature added. Extras available can be found in the setup.py file. They can be installed individually:

$ pip install "satpy[viirs_sdr]"

Or all at once, although this isn’t recommended due to the large number of dependencies:

$ pip install "satpy[all]"

Ubuntu System Python Installation

To install Satpy on an Ubuntu system we recommend using virtual environments to separate Satpy and its dependencies from the rest of the system. Note that these instructions require using “sudo” privileges which may not be available to all users and can be very dangerous. The following instructions attempt to install some Satpy dependencies using the Ubuntu apt package manager to ease installation. Replace /path/to/pytroll-env with the environment to be created.

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip python-gdal
$ sudo pip install virtualenv
$ virtualenv /path/to/pytroll-env
$ source /path/to/pytroll-env/bin/activate
$ pip install satpy