Back to Arrow

Installing PyArrow

docs/source/python/install.rst

latest7.8 KB
Original Source

.. Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one .. or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file .. distributed with this work for additional information .. regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file .. to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the .. "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance .. with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

.. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

.. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, .. software distributed under the License is distributed on an .. "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY .. KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the .. specific language governing permissions and limitations .. under the License.

Installing PyArrow

System Compatibility

PyArrow is regularly built and tested on Windows, macOS and various Linux distributions. We strongly recommend using a 64-bit system.

Python Compatibility

PyArrow is currently compatible with Python 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13 and 3.14.

Using Conda

Install the latest version of PyArrow from conda-forge <https://conda-forge.org/>_ using Conda <https://conda.io>_:

.. code-block:: bash

conda install -c conda-forge pyarrow

.. note::

While the ``pyarrow`` `conda-forge <https://conda-forge.org/>`_ package is
the right choice for most users, both a minimal and maximal variant of the
package exist, either of which may be better for your use case. See
:ref:`python-conda-differences`.

Using Pip

Install the latest version from PyPI <https://pypi.org/>_ (Windows, Linux, and macOS):

.. code-block:: bash

pip install pyarrow

If you encounter any importing issues of the pip wheels on Windows, you may need to install the latest Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio <https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170#latest-microsoft-visual-c-redistributable-version>_.

.. warning:: On Linux, you will need pip >= 19.0 to detect the prebuilt binary packages.

Installing nightly packages or from source

See :ref:python-development.

Dependencies

Optional dependencies

  • NumPy 1.21.2 or higher.
  • pandas 1.3.4 or higher,
  • cffi.

Additional packages PyArrow is compatible with are :ref:fsspec <filesystem-fsspec> and pytz, dateutil or tzdata package for timezones.

tzdata on Windows ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

On Linux and macOS, Arrow uses the OS-provided timezone database. On Windows, Arrow uses the Windows timezone database when built with MSVC or recent MinGW GCC (version 13+), which covers most pre-built packages. No additional setup is needed for these builds.

However, when PyArrow is built with Clang/libc++ on Windows, a user-provided IANA timezone database is required. To download and extract the text version of the IANA timezone database follow the instructions in the C++ :ref:download-timezone-database or use the (deprecated) pyarrow utility function pyarrow.util.download_tzdata_on_windows().

By default, the timezone database will be detected at %USERPROFILE%\Downloads\tzdata. If the database has been downloaded in a different location, you will need to set a custom path to the database from Python using the (deprecated) pa.set_timezone_db_path("custom_path") function.

.. note:: You may encounter problems writing datetime data to an ORC file if you install pyarrow with pip. One possible solution to fix this problem:

  1. Install tzdata with pip install tzdata
  2. Set the environment variable TZDIR = path\to\.venv\Lib\site-packages\tzdata\

You can find where tzdata is installed with the following python command:

.. code-block:: python

  import tzdata
  print(tzdata.__file__)  # path\to\.venv\Lib\site-packages\tzdata\__init__.py

.. _python-conda-differences:

Differences between conda-forge packages

On conda-forge <https://conda-forge.org/>_, PyArrow is published as three separate packages, each providing varying levels of functionality. This is in contrast to PyPi, where only a single PyArrow package is provided.

The purpose of this split is to minimize the size of the installed package for most users (pyarrow), provide a smaller, minimal package for specialized use cases (pyarrow-core), while still providing a complete package for users who require it (pyarrow-all). What was historically pyarrow on conda-forge <https://conda-forge.org/>_ is now pyarrow-all, though most users can continue using pyarrow.

The pyarrow-core package includes the following functionality:

  • :ref:data
  • :ref:compute (i.e., pyarrow.compute)
  • :ref:io
  • :ref:ipc (i.e., pyarrow.ipc)
  • :ref:filesystem (i.e., pyarrow.fs. Note: It's planned to move cloud fileystems (i.e., :ref:S3<filesystem-s3>, :ref:GCS<filesystem-gcs>, etc) into pyarrow in a future release though :ref:filesystem-localfs will remain in pyarrow-core.)
  • File formats: :ref:Arrow/Feather<feather>, :ref:JSON<json>, :ref:CSV<py-csv>, :ref:ORC<orc> (but not Parquet)

The pyarrow package adds the following:

  • Acero (i.e., pyarrow.acero)
  • :ref:dataset (i.e., pyarrow.dataset)
  • :ref:Parquet<parquet> (i.e., pyarrow.parquet)
  • Substrait (i.e., pyarrow.substrait)

Finally, pyarrow-all adds:

  • :ref:flight and Flight SQL (i.e., pyarrow.flight)
  • Gandiva (i.e., pyarrow.gandiva)

The following table lists the functionality provided by each package and may be useful when deciding to use one package over another or when :ref:python-conda-custom-selection.

+------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Component | Package | pyarrow-core | pyarrow | pyarrow-all | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Core | pyarrow-core | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Parquet | libparquet | | ✓ | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Dataset | libarrow-dataset | | ✓ | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Acero | libarrow-acero | | ✓ | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Substrait | libarrow-substrait | | ✓ | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Flight | libarrow-flight | | | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Flight SQL | libarrow-flight-sql | | | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+ | Gandiva | libarrow-gandiva | | | ✓ | +------------+---------------------+--------------+---------+-------------+

.. _python-conda-custom-selection:

Creating A Custom Selection ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If you know which components you need and want to control what's installed, you can create a custom selection of packages to include only the extra features you need. For example, to install pyarrow-core and add support for reading and writing Parquet, install libparquet alongside pyarrow-core:

.. code-block:: shell

conda install -c conda-forge pyarrow-core libparquet

Or if you wish to use pyarrow but need support for Flight RPC:

.. code-block:: shell

conda install -c conda-forge pyarrow libarrow-flight