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Installation

Starplot is available on PyPI and Conda, and its dependencies have binary wheels for most operating systems, so installation should be easy. See below for details.

Supported Python versions: 3.10 / 3.11 / 3.12 / 3.13 / 3.14

1. Install Dependencies

If you want to export plots to PNG, then you'll need Cairo. If you only want to export to SVG, you can skip this step.

On macOS (with Homebrew): 

brew install cairo

For Windows and Linux, see the Cairo website.

2. Install Starplot

pip install starplot

Or, via Conda: 

conda install conda-forge::starplot

3. Setup Starplot (optional)

starplot setup
  • Installs the required spatial extension for DuckDB
  • Downloads recommended fonts (Inter and GFS Didot)
  • Downloads catalogs for stars, constellations, and deep sky objects

Starplot will do this automatically when you first create a plot, but this setup command is a way to do it ahead of time (useful for deployed environments, continuous integration, etc). You can control where Starplot stores these files via environment variables.

Check out our tutorial for a quick intro to Starplot

Troubleshooting

GEOS / GDAL errors on installation - You may need to build these dependencies from source for your environment. See their websites for details: GEOS, GDAL

Segmentation Faults - If you're seeing "segmentation fault" errors when creating maps, you may have to install shapely from source for your runtime environment: 

pip install --no-binary :all: shapely
Warning: this may take awhile (5+ minutes), because it builds shapely from source.

Other Issue?

Please open an issue on our GitHub page and include the following information:

  • Starplot version
  • Python version
  • Operating system (and version)
  • Full stack trace of error