Installing NumPy and SciPy on Mac OSX 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

30 Jan 2013

I am playing with ExpEyes, which is awesome tool for anyone who wants to learn electronics (and physics).

ExpEyes comes with software (written in python) for GNU/Linux and Windows. I intend to run it on Mac OSX, because it can (provided all dependencies are met).

It is generally easy to install python packages on OSX using easy_install or pip, however, installing NumPy and SciPy turned out to be pain on OSX (10.8.2, latest version the time of posting).

In my case, I am using python binary installed via homebrew, so I can't take advantage of numpy (which comes installed with mountain-lion).

I have XCode 6 installed, which comes with gcc-4.2.1 (llvm build). I figured out, I can build numpy and scipy from source.

Following is what I did to build numpy and scipy. SciPy requires gfortran, so that has to be installed (I used homebrew to do that):

$ git clone https://github.com/numpy/numpy.git
$ git clone https://github.com/scipy/scipy.git
$ cd numpy
$ python setup.py build && python setup.py install
$ brew install gfortran
$ cd ../scipy
$ python setup.py build && python setup.py install

BTW! In case, you are wondering, why didn't I use Scipy Superpack script, which indeed makes job easier?

I didn't, because I want to install gnu/unix packages using homebrew, and I already have git and other things. Super Spicypack downloads (gfortran, etc.), builds and installs packages directly to system, making it harder to remove those later? Homebrew makes job easier.