Installation

python-blosc comes with C Blosc sources, so it does not depend on any other library (bar Python itself of course). Of course, if you are going to install from sources, you are going to need a C compiler (GCC, clang and MSVC 2008/2010/2012/2015 have been tested).

Also, there are situations where you may want to link with an already existing Blosc library in your system. You can do that too.

This package supports Python 3.6 or higher versions.

Installing from PyPI repository

Do:

$ pip install -U blosc

Installing from the Anaconda Cloud

Do:

$ conda install -c conda-forge python-blosc

Building manually

First, go to the python-blosc official repository at Blosc/python-blosc and download the sources.

Then, there are different ways to compile python-blosc, depending on whether you want to link with an already installed Blosc library or not.

Installing via setuptools

python-blosc comes with the Blosc sources with it and can be built with:

$ python -m pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

Any codec can be enabled (=1) or disabled (=0) on this build-path with the appropriate OS environment variables INCLUDE_LZ4, INCLUDE_SNAPPY, INCLUDE_ZLIB, and INCLUDE_ZLIB. By default all the codecs in Blosc are enabled except Snappy (due to some issues with C++ with the gcc toolchain).

setuptools is limited to using the compiler specified in the environment variable CC which on posix systems is usually gcc. This often causes trouble with the Snappy codec, which is written in C++, and as a result Snappy is no longer compiled by default. This problem is not known to affect MSVC or clang. Snappy is considered optional in Blosc as its compression performance is below that of the other codecs.

That’s all. You can proceed with testing section now.

Compiling with an installed Blosc library

This approach uses pre-built, fully optimized versions of Blosc built via CMake.

Go to Blosc/c-blosc and download and install the C-Blosc library. Then, you can tell python-blosc where is the C-Blosc library in a couple of ways:

Using an environment variable:

$ BLOSC_DIR=/usr/local     (or "set BLOSC_DIR=\blosc" on Win)
$ export BLOSC_DIR         (not needed on Win)
$ python setup.py build_clib
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

Using a flag:

$ python setup.py build_clib
$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace --blosc=/usr/local

Generating Sphinx documentation

In case you want to generate the documentation locally, you will need to have the Sphinx documentation system, as well as the numpydoc extension, installed. Then go down to doc/ directory and do:

$ make html|latex|latexpdf

Testing

After compiling, you can quickly check that the package is sane by running the doctests in blosc/test.py:

$ python -m blosc.test  (add -v for verbose mode)

Once installed, you can re-run the tests at any time with:

$ python -c "import blosc; blosc.test()"

Installing

Install it as a typical Python package:

$ python -m pip install .