Installation on OS X using Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for OS X in the vein of APT (apt-get) on Debian operating systems. It works by providing recipes to install software from source. The advantage is that it is usually very up-to-date and simply works.

To install Homebrew follow the installation instructions on their homepage (make sure the listed requirements are fulfilled).

Installing Python, the Scientific Python Stack and other required packages

The gcc formula provides the gfortran compiler required by NumPy and SciPy. Also install a non-system, up-to-date, version of Python. zmq and pyqt are required for IPython notebook and Qt console, respectively.

$ brew tap Homebrew/python
$ brew update
$ brew install gcc python numpy scipy matplotlib matplotlib-basemap zmq pyqt

Make sure that

$ which pip

evaluates to /usr/local/bin/pip before continuing.

Installing other ObsPy dependencies

Use pip to install the remaining ObsPy dependencies and a few must-have packages:

$ pip install mock flake8 # For obspy-runtests
$ pip install ipython\[all\] # IPython and its main optional dependencies

Installing ObsPy

To install the latest stable version type:

$ pip install obspy

you can then at any point type

$ pip install --upgrade obspy

to update to the latest stable version.

Installing the latest master

If you a have a good reason (make sure to have one, otherwise install the latest stable version as described above) to use the latest master from GitHub, checkout out the git repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/obspy/obspy.git
$ cd obspy
$ pip install .         # for a normal installation
$ pip install -v -e .   # for an editable installation

Testing the installation

To check if everything works as expected you can run ObsPy's included test suite via

$ obspy-runtests

This will run all tests and provides a way to report any potential errors to us. No occurring errors means that you now have a fully working ObsPy installation. Head over to the Tutorial to learn how to use it.