installation.rst

Installation

Step 1: Install a Miniconda (or Anaconda) environment

Any Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows computer with a web browser (preferably Google Chrome) should be suitable. 16GB of RAM is required for some of the examples, but most will run fine in 4GB.

If you don't already have conda on your machine, you can get it from Anaconda.com, and then open a terminal window.

If you do have conda already, it's a good idea to update it (running it twice to get the very latest) to ensure you have the latest version:

> conda update conda
> conda update conda

You should then create a separate Conda environment to work in for this tutorial:

> conda create -n pyviz-tutorial python=3.6
> conda activate pyviz-tutorial

Depending on how your conda is set up, you may need to use "source" instead of "conda" activate, or sometimes just "activate" on Windows.

Step 2: Install pyviz and other required libraries

> conda install -c pyviz/label/dev pyviz

Step 3: Install the tutorials in your current working directory and download data

> pyviz examples

This will (a) create a copy of the notebooks and related files needed for the tutorial in a new subdirectory pyviz-examples/tutorial, and (b) download larger sample datasets such as NYC Taxi.

If you only want to get a copy of the examples, or only want to download the data, there are individual commands pyviz copy-examples and pyviz fetch-data; run e.g. pyviz copy-examples --help for more info.

Step 4: Launch Jupyter Notebook

You can then launch the notebook server and client:

> cd pyviz-examples
> jupyter notebook

A browser window with a Jupyter Notebook instance should now open, letting you select and execute each notebook. You can start with the ones in the "tutorial" subdirectory, which will point you to various "exercises" directory along with the applications in the "apps" directory. The first notebook to load is the index page index.ipynb in tutorial/, which makes it simple to load each of the others.

If you don't see the notebook appear (e.g. on some OS X versions), you may need to cut and paste the URL from the console output manually.

Step 5: Test that everything is working

You can see if everything has installed correctly by selecting the 0 - Setup notebook from the index and doing "Cell/Run All" in the menus. There may be warnings on some platforms, but you'll know it is working if you see the orange HoloViews logo after it runs hv.extension().

Step 6: Run the tutorials

Now you can run through the tutorials, learn how to use all these tools, and apply them to anything you need to visualize. Have fun!