Installing basemap on Mac / Python

After trying for a long time I managed to make basemap-1.1.0 install on High Sierra. Dependency versioning was important.

I installed Python 3.6 with homebrew. Next I created a venv. I then used pip to install matplotlib pip install matplotlib==2.2 (3+ wouldn't work).

I then followed the instructions here:

https://www.fsanmartin.co/mac-install-matplotlib-basemap-on-virtualenv/

And it finally worked!

Big thank you to the kind person who wrote those instructions.

Did you ever manage to get it working?

I was able to install Basemap fine on Sierra (also using Homebrew for its dependencies), following the instructions here: http://matplotlib.org/basemap/users/installing.html

A couple notes, just to make sure nothing is being overlooked:

• In your notes, you listed brew install gets, though I assume it was a typo and you actually meant & used brew install geos when installing.
• Are you certain the correct version of geos was used when modifying your .bash_profile? Some of the examples I've seen around the web use a specific version, so there's always a chance for a copy/paste error. As of yesterday, the version I wound up using was 3.5.0, so my path looked like this: export GEOS_DIR=/usr/local/Cellar/geos/3.5.0/. The version can be verified by looking in your /usr/local/Cellar/geos/ directory to see which one is installed.
• I'm not 100% certain this matters, but did you reload your .bash_profile after modifying it? source ~/.bash_profile.

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This is a full list of what I did:

brew install matplotlib
brew install numpy
brew install geos
brew install proj

Downloaded Basemap 1.0.7 source tar file (https://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib/files/matplotlib-toolkits/), untarred it.

Added export GEOS_DIR=/usr/local/Cellar/geos/3.5.0/ to a new line in my .bash_profile, and then reloaded it via:

source ~/.bash_profile

From within untarred Basemap directory:

python setup.py install

Imported Basemap in a python script (via a tutorial elsewhere) with import mpl_toolkits.basemap as bm, and was able to confirm it worked with a produced map.

On 10.14 Mojave today I did:

brew install geos
pip3 install https://github.com/matplotlib/basemap/archive/master.zip

and it seems to work (mine is Python 3.6 from https://python.org with matplotlib installed by pip).

I had trouble installing Basemap on macOS Catalina. Got all the dependencies installed but Basemap itself was giving me trouble.

I wound up needing to install with

$ pip3 install /path/to/basemap.tar.gz --user

after downloading the latest release archive from the releases page.

Not sure if it’ll help anyone else, but after an hour of flailing and trying different things, it got me up and running where trying to install from GitHub (which would build, but not install, a wheel for Basemap) and directly compiling wouldn’t.