Building NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, and IPython from source

As a last resort or if we want to have the latest code, we can build from source. In practice, it shouldn't be that hard, although depending on your operating system, you might run into problems. As operating systems and related software are rapidly evolving, in such cases, the best you can do is search online or ask for help. In this chapter, we give pointers on good places to look for help.

The source code can be retrieved with git or as an archive from GitHub. The steps to install NumPy from source are straightforward and given here. We can retrieve the source code for NumPy with git as follows:

$ git clone git://github.com/numpy/numpy.git numpy

Note

There are similar commands for SciPy, matplotlib, and IPython (refer to the table that follows after this piece of information). The IPython source code can be downloaded from https://github.com/ipython/ipython/releases as a source archive or ZIP file. You can then unpack it with your favorite tool or with the following command:

$ tar -xzf ipython.tar.gz

Please refer to the following table for the git commands and source archive/zip links:

Library	Git command	Tarball/zip URL
NumPy	git clone git://github.com/numpy/numpy.git numpy	https://github.com/numpy/numpy/releases
SciPy	git clone http://github.com/scipy/scipy.git scipy	https://github.com/scipy/scipy/releases
matplotlib	git clone git://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib.git	https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/releases
IPython	git clone --recursive https://github.com/ipython/ipython.git	https://github.com/ipython/ipython/releases

Install on /usr/local with the following command from the source code directory:

$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local

To build, we need a C compiler such as GCC and the Python header files in the python-dev or python-devel package.