Installing build dependencies

Setting up Python virtual environment

A good practice is to create a separate Python virtual environment for each project. If you don’t have virtualenv yet, install and activate it using:

curl -O https://raw.github.com/pypa/virtualenv/master/virtualenv.py
python virtualenv.py <name_of_the_venv>
. <name_of_the_venv>/bin/activate

Installing Cython

Use pip (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip) to install Cython:

pip install Cython>=0.16

Installing numpy

Use pip to install numpy:

pip install numpy

It takes some time to compile numpy, so it might be more convenient to install it from a binary release.

Note

Installing numpy in a virtual environment on Windows is not straightforward.

It is recommended to download a suitable binary .exe release from http://www.scipy.org/Download/ and install it using easy_install (i.e. easy_install numpy-1.6.2-win32-superpack-python2.7.exe).

Note

You can find binaries for 64-bit Windows on http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/.

Installing Sphinx

Sphinx is a documentation tool that converts reStructuredText files into nicely looking html documentation. Install it with:

pip install Sphinx