Installation

Installing from PyPI

Precompiled binary wheels for Windows, GNU/Linux and MacOS are available on PyPI and can be installed with pip:

python -m pip install basemap

Installing basemap will also install basemap-data, containing the minimal data assets required by basemap. If you also need the high-resolution data assets, you can install them with pip too:

python -m pip install basemap-data-hires

Installing from conda-forge

For Miniforge users, basemap packages are available through the conda-forge channel:

conda install -c conda-forge basemap

Similarly to the PyPI installation, the high-resolution data assets can be installed separately if needed:

conda install -c conda-forge basemap-data-hires

Installing from source

Optionally, you can also install basemap from its source hosted on GitHub as indicated in the following steps:

  1. Install pre-requisite Python modules:

  2. Download the basemap source code:

    git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/matplotlib/basemap.git

  3. Build the GEOS library. You may use the helper provided in the utils folder (please note that you need CMake and a working C compiler in advance):

    export GEOS_DIR=<your desired location>
python -c "import utils; utils.GeosLibrary('3.6.5').build(installdir='${GEOS_DIR}')"

    or you can link directly to the system library if it is already installed. GEOS_DIR must point to the GEOS installation prefix; e.g. if libgeos_c.so is located in /usr/lib and geos_c.h is located in /usr/include, then you must set GEOS_DIR to /usr.

  4. Build and install the basemap binary wheel:

    python -m pip install .

    On GNU/Linux, if your Python was installed through a package management system, make sure that you have the Python header Python.h required to build Cython extensions (e.g. on Debian-like systems, you should have the package python-dev installed).

  5. Check that the package was installed correctly by executing:

    python -c "from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap"