Matplotlib is partcipating in GSOC 2020! See discourse for details. Apply by March 31, 2020.

John Hunter Excellence in Plotting Contest 2020 submissions are open! Entries are due June 1, 2020.

Version 3.2.1
Fork me on GitHub

Search

home | contents » User's Guide » previous | next | modules | index

Installing
Note ◾ Installing an official release
◾ Test data
If you wish to contribute to the project, it's recommended you install
the latest development version. ◾ Third-party distributions of
Matplotlib
◾ Scientific Python
Contents Distributions
◾ Linux: using your package
◾ Installing manager
◾ Installing an official release ◾ Installing from source
◾ Test data
◾ Dependencies
◾ Third-party distributions of Matplotlib
◾ Building on Linux
◾ Scientific Python Distributions ◾ Building on macOS
◾ Linux: using your package manager ◾ Building on Windows
◾ Installing from source ◾ Wheel builds using conda
◾ Dependencies packages
◾ Building on Linux ◾ Conda packages
◾ Building on macOS
◾ Building on Windows
◾ Wheel builds using conda packages Documentation overview
◾ Conda packages ◾ User's Guide
◾ Previous: User's Guide
◾ Next: Tutorials

Matplotlib and its dependencies are available as wheel packages for Show Page Source
macOS, Windows and Linux distributions:

python -m pip install -U pip

python -m pip install -U matplotlib

Note
 The following backends work out of the box: Agg, ps, pdf, svg and
TkAgg.

For support of other GUI frameworks, LaTeX rendering, saving

animations and a larger selection of file formats, you may need to
install additional dependencies.

Although not required, we suggest also installing IPython for interactive

use. To easily install a complete Scientific Python stack, see Scientific
Python Distributions below.

The wheels (*.whl) on the PyPI download page do not contain test data
or example code.

If you want to try the many demos that come in the Matplotlib source
distribution, download the *.tar.gz file and look in the examples
subdirectory.

To run the test suite:

• extract the lib/matplotlib/tests or lib/mpl_toolkits/tests

directories from the source distribution;
• install test dependencies: pytest, Pillow, MiKTeX, GhostScript,
ffmpeg, avconv, ImageMagick, and Inkscape;
• run python -mpytest.

Anaconda and Canopy and ActiveState are excellent choices that "just
work" out of the box for Windows, macOS and common Linux platforms.
WinPython is an option for Windows users. All of these distributions
include Matplotlib and lots of other useful (data) science tools.

If you are on Linux, you might prefer to use your package manager.
Matplotlib is packaged for almost every major Linux distribution.

• Debian / Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install python3-matplotlib

• Fedora: sudo dnf install python3-matplotlib
• Red Hat: sudo yum install python3-matplotlib
• Arch: sudo pacman -S python-matplotlib

If you are interested in contributing to Matplotlib development, running the

latest source code, or just like to build everything yourself, it is not difficult
to build Matplotlib from source. Grab the latest tar.gz release file from the
PyPI files page, or if you want to develop Matplotlib or just need the latest
bugfixed version, grab the latest git version, and see Install from source.
The standard environment variables CC, CXX, PKG_CONFIG are respected.
This means you can set them if your toolchain is prefixed. This may be
used for cross compiling.

export CC=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-gcc
export CXX=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-g++
export PKG_CONFIG=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-pkg-config

Once you have satisfied the requirements detailed below (mainly Python,
NumPy, libpng and FreeType), you can build Matplotlib.

cd matplotlib
python -mpip install .

We provide a setup.cfg file which you can use to customize the build
process. For example, which default backend to use, whether some of the
optional libraries that Matplotlib ships with are installed, and so on. This
file will be particularly useful to those packaging Matplotlib.

Matplotlib requires the following dependencies:

• Python (>= 3.6)

• FreeType (>= 2.3)
• libpng (>= 1.2)
• NumPy (>= 1.11)
• setuptools
• cycler (>= 0.10.0)
• dateutil (>= 2.1)
• kiwisolver (>= 1.0.0)
• pyparsing

Optionally, you can also install a number of packages to enable better

user interface toolkits. See What is a backend? for more details on the
optional Matplotlib backends and the capabilities they provide.

• Tk (>= 8.3, != 8.6.0 or 8.6.1): for the Tk-based backends;

• PyQt4 (>= 4.6) or PySide (>= 1.0.3) [1]: for the Qt4-based
backends;
• PyQt5: for the Qt5-based backends;
• PyGObject: for the GTK3-based backends [2];
• wxPython (>= 4) [3]: for the wx-based backends;
• cairocffi (>= 0.8) or pycairo: for the cairo-based backends;
• Tornado: for the WebAgg backend;

[1] PySide cannot be pip-installed on Linux (but can be conda-installed).

[2] If using pip (and not conda), PyGObject must be built from source;
see
https://pygobject.readthedocs.io/en/latest/devguide/dev_environ.html.
[3] If using pip (and not conda) on Linux, wxPython wheels must be
manually downloaded from https://wxpython.org/pages/downloads/.
For better support of animation output format and image file formats,
LaTeX, etc., you can install the following:

• ffmpeg/avconv: for saving movies;

• ImageMagick: for saving animated gifs;
• Pillow (>= 3.4): for a larger selection of image file formats: JPEG,
BMP, and TIFF image files;
• LaTeX and GhostScript (>=9.0) : for rendering text with LaTeX;
• fontconfig (>= 2.7): for detection of system fonts on Linux.

Note
Matplotlib depends on non-Python libraries.

On Linux and OSX, pkg-config can be used to find required non-

Python libraries and thus make the install go more smoothly if the
libraries and headers are not in the expected locations.

If not using pkg-config (in particular on Windows), you may need to

set the include path (to the FreeType, libpng, and zlib headers) and
link path (to the FreeType, libpng, and zlib libraries) explicitly, if
they are not in standard locations. This can be done using standard
environment variables -- on Linux and OSX:

export CFLAGS='-I/directory/containing/ft2build.h ...'

export LDFLAGS='-L/directory/containing/libfreetype.so ...'

 

and on Windows:

set CL=/IC:\directory\containing\ft2build.h ...

set LINK=/LIBPATH:C:\directory\containing\freetype.lib ...

 

where ... means "also give, in the same format, the directories
containing png.h and zlib.h for the include path, and for
libpng.so/png.lib and libz.so/z.lib for the link path."

Note
The following libraries are shipped with Matplotlib:

• Agg: the Anti-Grain Geometry C++ rendering engine;

• qhull: to compute Delaunay triangulation;
• ttconv: a TrueType font utility.

It is easiest to use your system package manager to install the

dependencies.

If you are on Debian/Ubuntu, you can get all the dependencies required to
build Matplotlib with:

sudo apt-get build-dep python-matplotlib

If you are on Fedora, you can get all the dependencies required to build
Matplotlib with:

sudo dnf builddep python-matplotlib

If you are on RedHat, you can get all the dependencies required to build
Matplotlib by first installing yum-builddep and then running:

su -c "yum-builddep python-matplotlib"

These commands do not build Matplotlib, but instead get and install the
build dependencies, which will make building from source easier.

The build situation on macOS is complicated by the various places one

can get the libpng and FreeType requirements (MacPorts, Fink,
/usr/X11R6), the different architectures (e.g., x86, ppc, universal), and the
different macOS versions (e.g., 10.4 and 10.5). We recommend that you
build the way we do for the macOS release: get the source from the tarball
or the git repository and install the required dependencies through a third-
party package manager. Two widely used package managers are
Homebrew, and MacPorts. The following example illustrates how to install
libpng and FreeType using brew:

brew install libpng freetype pkg-config

If you are using MacPorts, execute the following instead:

port install libpng freetype pkgconfig

After installing the above requirements, install Matplotlib from source by

executing:

python -mpip install .

Note that your environment is somewhat important. Some conda users

have found that, to run the tests, their PYTHONPATH must include
/path/to/anaconda/.../site-packages and their
DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH must include /path/to/anaconda/lib.

The Python shipped from https://www.python.org is compiled with Visual

Studio 2015 for 3.5+. Python extensions should be compiled with the
same compiler, see e.g. https://packaging.python.org/guides/packaging-
binary-extensions/#setting-up-a-build-environment-on-windows for how to
set up a build environment.

Since there is no canonical Windows package manager, the methods for

building FreeType, zlib, and libpng from source code are documented as a
build script at matplotlib-winbuild.
There are a few possibilities to build Matplotlib on Windows:

• Wheels via matplotlib-winbuild

• Wheels by using conda packages (see below)
• Conda packages (see below)

If you are building your own Matplotlib wheels (or sdists), note that any
DLLs that you copy into the source tree will be packaged too.

This is a wheel build, but we use conda packages to get all the
requirements. The binary requirements (png, FreeType,...) are statically
linked and therefore not needed during the wheel install.

Set up the conda environment. Note, if you want a qt backend, add pyqt
to the list of conda packages.

conda create -n "matplotlib_build" python=3.7 numpy python-dateutil pyparsing tornado cycler tk libpng zlib freet
conda activate matplotlib_build
# force the build against static libpng and zlib libraries
set MPLSTATICBUILD=True
python setup.py bdist_wheel

 

The conda packaging scripts for Matplotlib are available at

https://github.com/conda-forge/matplotlib-feedstock.

© Copyright 2002 - 2012 John Hunter, Darren Dale, Eric Firing, Michael Droettboom and the Matplotlib development team; 2012 - 2018 The
Matplotlib development team.
Last updated on Mar 19, 2020. Created using Sphinx 2.2.2. Doc version v3.2.1-6-g9a2f0578f.