Building From Source on Mac OSX

These instructions describe how to build NumPy and SciPy libraries from source.

If you just want to use NumPy or SciPy, install pre-built binaries as described in /install.

Python

Apple ships its own version of Python with OS X. However, we strongly recommend installing the official Python distribution.

Alternatively, use Python from one of the OS X package managers (Homebrew, MacPorts, Fink).

Compilers (C/C++/FORTRAN/Cython)

Though virtually any commercial C/C++ compiler may be used with SciPy, OS X comes with GNU C compilers pre-installed. The only thing missing is the GNU FORTRAN compiler.

We recommend gfortran; this is a free, open source, F95 compiler. We suggest you use the following binaries:

• gfortran installed via Homebrew, or,
• http://r.research.att.com/tools/gcc-42-5666.3-darwin11.pkg (for Xcode 4.2 or higher)

See this site for the most recent links.

Unless you are building from released source packages, the Cython compiler is also needed.

BLAS/LAPACK Installation

You will also need to install a library providing the BLAS and LAPACK interfaces. ATLAS, OpenBLAS, and MKL all work. OpenBLAS can be installed via Homebrew.

As of Scipy version 1.2.0, we do not support compiling against the system Accelerate library for BLAS and LAPACK. It does not support a sufficiently recent LAPACK interface.

Version-specific notes

This section notes only things specific to one version of OS X or Python. The build instructions in Obtaining and Building NumPy and SciPy apply to all versions.

Obtaining and Building NumPy and SciPy

You may install NumPy and SciPy either by checking out the source files from the Git repositories, or unpacking them from a source archive file from /scipylib/download. If you choose the latter, simply expand the archive (generally a gzipped tar file), otherwise check out the following branches from the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/numpy/numpy.git
$ git clone https://github.com/scipy/scipy.git

Both NumPy and SciPy are built as follows:

$ python setup.py build
$ python setup.py install

The above applies to the official Python distribution, which is 32-bit only for 2.6 while 32/64-bit bundles are available for 2.7 and 3.x. For alternative 64-bit Pythons (either from Apple or home-built) on Snow Leopard, you may need to extend your build flags to specify the architecture by setting LDFLAGS and FFLAGS.

Note that with distutils (setup.py) given build flags like LDFLAGS do not extend but override the defaults, so you have to specify all necessary flags. Only try this if you know what you’re doing!

After a successful build, you may try running the built-in unit tests for SciPy:

$ python
>>> import numpy as np
>>> np.test('full')
>>> import scipy
>>> scipy.test()

Be sure not to import numpy or scipy while you’re in the numpy/scipy source tree. Change directory first.

If you have any problems installing SciPy on your Mac based on these instructions, please check the scipy-users and scipy-dev mailing list archives for possible solutions. If you are still stuck, feel free to join scipy-users for further assistance. Please have the following information ready:

• Your OS version
• The versions of gcc and gfortran and where you obtained gfortran
  • $ gcc --version
  • $ gfortran --version
• The versions of numpy and scipy that you are trying to install
• The full output of $ python setup.py build