Installation

Conda pre-built binaries

The easiest way to install Cartopy is by using Conda. If conda is already installed, installation is as easy as:

conda install -c conda-forge cartopy

Other pre-built binaries

Additional pre-built binaries can be found at a variety of sources, including:

Building from source

Before building Cartopy from source, you need to first install the required dependencies listed below. Once these are installed, Cartopy can be installed using the pip installer:

pip install cartopy

To instead install the most recent version found on the GitHub master branch, use:

pip install git+https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy.git

Alternatively, you can clone the git repo on your computer and install manually using the setup.py file:

git clone https://github.com/SciTools/cartopy.git
cd cartopy
# Uncomment the following to specify non-standard include and library paths
# python setup.py build_ext -I/path/to/include -L/path/to/lib
python setup.py install

Required dependencies

In order to install Cartopy, or to access its basic functionality, it will be necessary to first install GEOS, Shapely, and pyshp. Many of these packages can be installed using pip or other package managers such as apt-get (Linux) and brew (macOS). Many of these dependencies are built as part of Cartopy’s conda distribution, and the recipes for these packages can be found at https://github.com/conda-forge/feedstocks.

For macOS, the required dependencies can be installed in the following way:

brew install proj geos
pip3 install --upgrade pyshp
# shapely needs to be built from source to link to geos. If it is already
# installed, uninstall it by: pip3 uninstall shapely
pip3 install shapely --no-binary shapely

Still on macOS, make sure you have installed pkg-config and set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable as follows:

brew install pkg-config
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/bin/pkgconfig

Then you can install cartopy using:

pip3 install cartopy

If you are installing dependencies with a package manager on Linux, you may need to install the development packages (look for a “-dev” or “-devel” suffix) in addition to the core packages.

Further information about the required dependencies can be found here:

Python 3.7 or later (https://www.python.org/)

Python 2 support was removed in v0.19.

Matplotlib 3.1 or later (https://matplotlib.org/)

Python package for 2D plotting. Python package required for any graphical capabilities.

GEOS 3.7.2 or later (https://trac.osgeo.org/geos/)

GEOS is an API of spatial predicates and functions for processing geometry written in C++.

Shapely 1.6.4 or later (https://github.com/Toblerity/Shapely)

Python package for the manipulation and analysis of planar geometric objects.

pyshp 2.1 or later (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyshp)

Pure Python read/write support for ESRI Shapefile format.

PROJ 8.0.0 or later (https://proj.org/)

Coordinate transformation library.

pyproj 3.0.0 or later (https://github.com/pyproj4/pyproj/)

Python interface to PROJ (cartographic projections and coordinate transformations library).

Optional Dependencies

To make the most of Cartopy by enabling additional functionality, you may want to install these optional dependencies.

GDAL version 2.3.2 (https://gdal.org/)

GDAL is a translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats, which has powerful data transformation and processing capabilities.

Pillow 6.1.0 or later (https://python-pillow.org)

A popular fork of PythonImagingLibrary.

pykdtree 1.2.2 or later (https://github.com/storpipfugl/pykdtree)

A fast kd-tree implementation that is used for faster warping of images than SciPy.

SciPy 1.3.1 or later (https://www.scipy.org/)

A Python package for scientific computing.

OWSLib 0.18 (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/OWSLib)

A Python package for client programming with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web service, and which gives access to Cartopy ogc clients.

Fiona 1.0 or later (https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona)

A Python package for reading shapefiles that is faster than pyshp.

Testing Dependencies

These packages are required for the full Cartopy test suite to run.

flufl.lock (https://flufllock.readthedocs.io/)

A platform independent file lock for Python.

pytest 5.1.2 or later (https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/)

Python package for software testing.

pep8 1.3.3 or later (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pep8)

Python package for software testing.

Using Cartopy and AxesGrid toolkit API reference