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.