Installation from wheel

Our pre-built executable installers are the easiest way to start using Sympathy for Data on Windows. They contain everything needed to run Sympathy for Data including a fully-featured Python environment specifically tailored for data analysis.

The instructions below are for cases when you instead want to install Sympathy for Data from a wheel file.

If you prefer to install Sympathy manually from a wheel file there are a few steps required:

  1. Install python

  2. Create a virtual environment

  3. Install dependencies

  4. Install Sympathy from a local wheel file

1. Install Python

Sympathy for Data currently supports Python 3.10, 3.11 and 3.12. While it may also run on newer minor versions, it will not run correctly on older versions.

Windows

On Windows you have to download and install an appropriate version of Python. That is, the Windows installer (64-bit) for a supported version. Make sure to include pip while installing.

MacOS

These instructions are written for MacOS X 11.7.6 using MacPorts.

Start by installing XCode from the App Store (that will download an XCode installer, so this is a two-stage process).

sudo xcode-select --install
sudo xcodebuild -license

Download and install MacPorts. Before continuing, it is recommended to update the package definitions.

sudo port selfupdate

Then install the dependencies.

sudo port install python310 unixODBC

Linux

The current version of Sympathy for Data officially supports Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. To install on other versions (and distributions), you may have to adjust the steps.

First update your package definitions and update outdated packages.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then install the required prerequisites

sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-dev python3-venv unixodbc-dev

2. Create virtual environment

Though not strictly necessary, we strongly recommend that you use a virtual environment rather than installing in a system level python installation!

Navigate to a directory in which you want to create the virtual environment. In the following instructions, replace <python> with the path to the python executable from the previous step. Also, replace <env-sympathy> with the name that you want to use for the virtual environment.

Windows

<python> -m venv <env-sympathy>
cd <env-sympathy>\Scripts
activate.bat
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel

MacOS/Linux

<python> -m venv <env-sympathy>
source <env-sympathy>/bin/activate
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel

3. Install dependencies

To ensure compatibility we suggest that you install the same versions of all the dependencies for Sympathy that are used in the self-contained installer. These requirements can be downloaded here for Sympathy version 6. After downloading the file run the following command in your virtual environment:

pip install -r requirements-6.0.0.txt

Skipping this step will install the latest versions of all dependencies instead. While this might work fine, there is no way for us to guarantee this. If you run into trouble when trying to run Sympathy in custom environment you can try to downgrade packages. Again, to be completely certain of using supported versions, install the requirements as detailed above before installing Sympathy.

4. Install Sympathy from wheel

With the desired python environment active, run the following to install Sympathy (replace <sympathy-filename> with the filename of your wheel file):

pip install <sympathy-filename>.whl
python -m sympathy install

You are now ready to run Sympathy for Data!

Running Sympathy

In order to run Sympathy using python, first make sure that the virtual environment used in the installation steps is active. You can run Sympathy either with a GUI (first command below), or for data processing applications in head-less mode (second command). For a more comprehensive list of commands and options, see Top-level commands.

python -m sympathy gui
python -m sympathy cli <my-workflow>

Installing Sympathy also creates additional executables for your virtual environment. On Windows these are typically located in a folder called “Scripts”, and on Unix in a folder called “bin”. These executables run Sympathy in the same way as above but does not require the virtual environment to be activated beforehand.

sympathy-gui
sympathy-cli <my-workflow>

Troubleshooting

If you see any text in red during the execution of pip, this would typically mean that some library is missing in your system. See the section for your OS below for instructions on how to install packages.

MacOS

For example, if you get an error while installing pyodbc, that typically means you need to install a package named unixODBC. Use port to install missing libraries.

Some small functionality (like drag and dropping flows to open them) depends on pyobjc being installed as well, on Mac. This pip package adds a lot of dependencies however, so it is left to the user to decide if this is wanted:

pip install pyobjc  # optional

Linux

For example, if you get an error while installing pyodbc, that typically means you need to install a package named unixodbc-dev (or unixODBC-devel, the names tend to vary across Linux distributions). Use apt (or the package manager that is preferred by your distribution) to install missing libraries.

sudo apt install unixodbc-dev

Optional features

These optional features can be installed to extend the functionality of Sympathy for Data. See the outlined sections for more information: