Warning

This documents an unmaintained version of NetworkX. Please upgrade to a maintained version and see the current NetworkX documentation.

Installing

Before installing NetworkX, you need to have setuptools installed.

Quick install

Get NetworkX from the Python Package Index at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/networkx

or install it with

pip install networkx

and an attempt will be made to find and install an appropriate version that matches your operating system and Python version.

You can install the development version (at github.com) with

pip install git://github.com/networkx/networkx.git#egg=networkx

More download file options are at https://networkx.org/download.html.

Installing from source

You can install from source by downloading a source archive file (tar.gz or zip) or by checking out the source files from the Mercurial source code repository.

NetworkX is a pure Python package; you don’t need a compiler to build or install it.

Source archive file

  1. Download the source (tar.gz or zip file) from https://pypi.python.org/pypi/networkx/ or get the latest development version from https://github.com/networkx/networkx/
  2. Unpack and change directory to the source directory (it should have the files README.txt and setup.py).
  3. Run python setup.py install to build and install
  4. (Optional) Run nosetests to execute the tests if you have nose installed.

GitHub

  1. Clone the networkx repostitory (see https://github.com/networkx/networkx/ for options)

    git clone https://github.com/networkx/networkx.git

  2. Change directory to networkx

  3. Run python setup.py install to build and install

  4. (Optional) Run nosetests to execute the tests if you have nose installed.

If you don’t have permission to install software on your system, you can install into another directory using the --user, --prefix, or --home flags to setup.py.

For example

python setup.py install --prefix=/home/username/python

or

python setup.py install --home=~

or

python setup.py install --user

If you didn’t install in the standard Python site-packages directory you will need to set your PYTHONPATH variable to the alternate location. See http://docs.python.org/2/install/index.html#search-path for further details.

Requirements

Python

To use NetworkX you need Python 2.7, 3.2 or later.

The easiest way to get Python and most optional packages is to install the Enthought Python distribution “Canopy”.

There are several other distributions that contain the key packages you need for scientific computing. See http://scipy.org/install.html for a list.

Optional packages

The following are optional packages that NetworkX can use to provide additional functions.

NumPy

Provides matrix representation of graphs and is used in some graph algorithms for high-performance matrix computations.

SciPy

Provides sparse matrix representation of graphs and many numerical scientific tools.

Matplotlib

Provides flexible drawing of graphs.

GraphViz

In conjunction with either

provides graph drawing and graph layout algorithms.

PyYAML

http://pyyaml.org/

Required for YAML format reading and writing.

Other packages

These are extra packages you may consider using with NetworkX