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Installation

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

Supported Python versions: 3.10 / 3.11 / 3.12

macOS / Linux

  1. Install Starplot: 

    pip install starplot

  2. (optional) Setup Starplot: 

    starplot setup --install-big-sky
    This will install the required spatial extension for DuckDB, build the matplotlib font cache, and download the full Big Sky catalog. Starplot will do this automatically, 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.

Docker

Here's a basic Docker container definition that'll get you up and running:

FROM python:3.11.11-bookworm

RUN pip install starplot
RUN starplot setup --install-big-sky  # Optional

What about Windows?

I haven't tried installing Starplot on Windows, but if you have and would like to share instructions, please feel free to open a pull request on GitHub with an update to this file (docs/installation.md). Thanks! :)

Troubleshooting

GEOS / GDAL errors on installation

If you see any errors related to GEOS and/or GDAL when trying to install Starplot, then you may need to build those dependencies from source for your environment.

See their websites for details:

Segmentation Fault with map plots

If you're seeing "segmentation fault" errors when creating map plots, 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.