Installation

Built distributions

Built distributions don’t require compiling PyMEOS, PyMEOS CFFI or MEOS, and can be installed using pip.

Installation from PyPI

PyMEOS and PyMEOS CFFI are available as binary distributions (wheel) for Linux (x64) and MacOS (x64 and arm64) platforms on PyPI. The distributions include the most recent version of MEOS available at the time of the PyMEOS release. Install the binary wheel with pip as follows:

pip install pymeos

Installation using conda

PyMEOS is also available on the conda-forge channel. First, set conda-forge as the priority channel:

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --set channel_priority strict

Then, install PyMEOS as follows:

conda install conda-forge::pymeos

Installation from source with custom MEOS library

If you want to use a specific MEOS version or a MEOS distribution that is already present on your system, you can compile the PyMEOS packages from source yourself, by directing pip to ignore the binary wheels.

Note that only PyMEOS CFFI will need to be compiled from sources, since PyMEOS is a pure Python package and doesn’t interact with MEOS directly.

First, make sure that MEOS is installed in your system. You can install it following the instructions in the MEOS documentation.

Then, install PyMEOS CFFI from source:

pip install pymeos-cffi --no-binary pymeos-cffi
pip install pymeos

Updating the PyMEOS CFFI wrapper for custom MEOS library

If your MEOS library API doesn’t match the one used by the PyMEOS CFFI wrapper, it will crash. You can fix this by updating the header file used by PyMEOS CFFI to match your MEOS version. To do so, you will need to recompile it using the builder scripts provided in the pymeos_cffi package.

Warning

While you can easily update pymeos_cffi, you won’t be able to do it so easily with pymeos. If you want to use the pymeos library with your custom pymeos_cffi, you should make sure that the part of the API used by pymeos hasn’t changed, or you’ll get an import error when using pymeos.

First, you will need to get the source code of PyMEOS CFFI. You can do so by downloading the source distribution from PyPI, or by cloning the repository from GitHub:

git clone git@github.com:MobilityDB/PyMEOS.git
cd PyMEOS/pymeos_cffi

Then, you will need to run the header builder script, which will generate a new header file based on the MEOS version installed in your system. The script accepts two parameters, a path to the MEOS header file, and a path to your MEOS library:

python3 ./pymeos_cffi/builder/build_header.py <path-to-header-file> <path-to-meos-library>

If no parameters are passed, the script will use the default header file and library path:

python3 ./pymeos_cffi/builder/build_header.py /usr/local/include/meos.h /usr/local/lib/libmeos.so

The second parameter is optional and is used to remove any function defined in the header file not exposed by the library. If omitted, this step will not be performed.

Then, you have to generate the PyMEOS CFFI wrapper functions using the functions builder script:

python3 ./pymeos_cffi/builder/build_pymeos_functions.py

This will update the functions.py file that contains all the python functions exposed by the library.

Finally, you can install the updated PyMEOS CFFI package:

pip install .