Installation

bcolz depends on NumPy and, optionally, Numexpr. Also, if you are going to install from sources, and a C compiler (Clang, GCC and MSVC 2008 for Python 2, and MSVC 2010 for Python 3, have been tested).

Installing from PyPI repository

Do:

$ easy_install -U bcolz

or:

$ pip install -U bcolz

Installing Windows binaries

Unofficial Windows binaries are provided by Christoph Gohlke and can be downloaded from:

http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#bcolz

Using the Microsoft Python 2.7 Compiler

As of Sept 2014 Microsoft has made a Visual C++ compiler for Python 2.7 available for download:

http://aka.ms/vcpython27

This has been made available specifically to ease the handling of Python packages with C-extensions on Windows (installation and building wheels).

It is possible to compile bcolz with this compiler (Jan 2015), however, you may need to use the following patch:

diff --git i/setup.py w/setup.py
index d77d37f233..b54bfd0fa1 100644
--- i/setup.py
+++ w/setup.py
@@ -11,8 +11,8 @@ from __future__ import absolute_import
 import sys
 import os
 import glob
-from distutils.core import Extension
-from distutils.core import setup
+from setuptools import Extension
+from setuptools import setup
 import textwrap
 import re, platform

Installing from tarball sources

Go to the bcolz main directory and do the typical distutils dance:

$ python setup.py build_ext --inplace

In case you have Blosc installed as an external library you can link with it (disregarding the included Blosc sources) 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_ext --inplace

Using a flag:

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

It is always nice to run the tests before installing the package:

$ PYTHONPATH=.   (or "set PYTHONPATH=." on Windows)
$ export PYTHONPATH    (not needed on Windows)
$ python -c"import bcolz; bcolz.test()"  # add `heavy=True` if desired

And if everything runs fine, then install it via:

$ python setup.py install

Testing the installation

You can always test the installation from any directory with:

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