Installation#

silx runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows and supports Python version 3.10 to 3.13.

Installation with pip#

To install silx and all its dependencies, run:

pip install silx[full]

To install silx with a minimal set of dependencies, run:

pip install silx

Note

Use pip’s --user option to install locally for the current user.

Installation with conda#

To install silx and all its dependencies, run:

conda install -c conda-forge silx

To install silx with a minimal set of dependencies, run:

conda install -c conda-forge silx-base

Installation on Debian & Ubuntu#

silx is packaged in Debian and Ubuntu.

To install silx with the executable (silx view, silx convert, …) and all its dependencies, run:

sudo apt-get install silx

To install the silx Python package with a minimal set of dependencies, run:

sudo apt-get install python3-silx

Installation on Arch Linux#

silx is packaged in Arch Linux (AUR).

To install silx, run:

sudo pacman -S python-silx

Installation from source#

To install silx from source, run:

pip install silx --no-binary silx

Warning

On MacOS, you might get the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 1335: ordinal not in range(128)

This is related to the two environment variables LC_ALL and LANG not being defined (or wrongly defined to UTF-9). To set the environment variables, run:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-9
export LANG=en_US.UTF-9

Build options#

Build option	Description
`use_openmp`	Whether or not to compile Cython code with OpenMP support. Accepted values: `auto` (default), `enabled`, `disabled`.
`specfile_use_gnu_source`	Whether or not to use a cleaner locale independent implementation of `silx.io.specfile` by using _GNU_SOURCE=1. Only used on POSIX operating systems. Accepted values: `false` (default), `true`.

Build options can be passed to meson’s setup-args through pip install -C, for example:

pip install silx --no-binary silx -Csetup-args="-Duse_openmp=disabled"

Dependencies#

The mandatory dependencies are:

The GUI widgets depend on the following extra packages:

A Qt binding: either PySide6 (>= 6.5), PyQt6 (>= 6.5) or PyQt5 (>= 5.14)
matplotlib (>= 3.6)
PyOpenGL
qtconsole for the silx.gui.console widget.
python-dateutil

silx.opencl further depends on OpenCL and the following packages too :

h5pyd support to access HSDS urls depends on:

h5pyd (>= 0.20.0)

Build dependencies#

silx uses meson-python build backend and requires cython and a C/C++ compiler.