Installation¶
Requirements¶
poliastro requires a number of Python packages, notably:
Astropy, for physical units and time handling
NumPy, for basic numerical routines
jplephem, for the planetary ephemerides using SPICE kernels
matplotlib, for static orbit plotting
numba (when using CPython), for accelerating the code
Plotly, for interactive orbit plotting
SciPy, for root finding and numerical propagation
poliastro is supported on Linux, macOS and Windows on Python 3.8 to 3.10.
Using conda¶
The easiest and fastest way to get the package up and running is to install poliastro using conda:
$ conda install -c conda-forge poliastro
or, better yet, using mamba,
which is a super fast replacement for conda
:
$ conda install -c conda-forge mamba
$ mamba install -c conda-forge poliastro
Note
We encourage users to use conda or mamba and the conda-forge packages for convenience, especially when developing on Windows. It is recommended to create a new environment.
If the installation fails for any reason, please open an issue in the issue tracker.
Alternative installation methods¶
You can also install poliastro from PyPI using pip:
$ pip install poliastro
Finally, you can also install the latest development version of poliastro directly from GitHub:
$ pip install https://github.com/poliastro/poliastro/archive/main.zip
This is useful if there is some feature that you want to try, but we did not release it yet as a stable version. Although you might find some unpolished details, these development installations should work without problems. If you find any, please open an issue in the issue tracker.
Warning
It is recommended that you never ever use sudo with distutils, pip, setuptools and friends in Linux because you might seriously break your system [1][2][3][4]. Use virtual environments instead.
Making poliastro work in your editor¶
Jupyter notebook and JupyterLab¶
To install the extra dependencies needed to make the interactive plots work on Jupyter, do
$ pip install poliastro[jupyter]
With Plotly versions older than 5 on JupyterLab, you will also need to install Node.js to enable the browser extensions. Check out their troubleshooting guide for further information.
Problems and suggestions¶
If for any reason you get an unexpected error message or an incorrect result, or you want to let the developers know about your use case, please open a new issue in the issue tracker and we will try to answer promptly.