Installation

This is the first chapter in the sunpy tutorial, and by the end of it you should have a working installation of Python and sunpy. For more info on different ways to install sunpy beyond the recommended way below, see Installation.

Installing Python

There are many ways to install Python, but even if you have Python installed somewhere on your computer we recommend following these instructions anyway. That’s because we will create a new Python environment. As well as containing a Python installation, this environment provides an isolated place to install Python packages (like sunpy) without affecting any other current Python installation.

The package manager we’ll be using is called conda. To install conda, follow the the miniforge installation instructions. This will install conda and automatically configure the default channel (a channel is a remote software repository) to be conda-forge, which is where sunpy is available.

Installing sunpy

To install sunpy, start by launching a terminal (under a UNIX-like system) or the miniforge Prompt (under Windows). Then create and activate new virtual environment

$ conda create --name sunpy
$ conda config --add channels conda-forge
$ conda config --set channel_priority strict
$ conda activate sunpy

In this case the environment is named ‘sunpy’. Feel free to change this to a different environment name. Now we have a fresh environment we can install sunpy:

$ conda install sunpy

This will install sunpy and all of its dependencies. If you want to install another package later, you can run conda install <package_name>.

Now we’ve got a working installation of sunpy, in the next few chapters we’ll look at some of the basic data structures sunpy uses for representing times, coordinates, and data with physical units.