Installation

If you want to use a HoloViz tool, you can install it into your current environment with pip or conda just as you would any other Python library. To get the most common HoloViz tools (panel, hvplot, holoviews, datashader, param, and colorcet), just do:

> conda install hvplot datashader

You can add geoviews to that list if you have geographic data that needs to be projected into different coordinates, and you can add lumen if you want to try low-code and no-code ways to use HoloViz tools.

Tutorial Installation

If you want to run the tutorials, we recommend following the five steps below instead of (or in addition to) installing HoloViz tools into your main environment. These tutorial installation instructions create a fully independent, separate environment just for running the tutorials, including all core and optional dependencies pinned to known working versions. That way, you can be sure you’re using the versions that have been tested with these examples, and you can also delete the entire directory later with no trace if you decide the tools aren’t useful to you.

Step 1: Install a Miniconda (or Anaconda) environment

Any Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows computer with a web browser (preferably Google Chrome) should be suitable. 16GB of RAM is required for some of the examples, but most will run fine in 4GB.

If you don’t already have conda on your machine, you can get it from conda.io, and then open a terminal window with the conda environment activated.

If you do have conda already, it’s a good idea to update it (running it twice to get the very latest) to ensure you have the latest version:

> conda update -n base conda
> conda update -n base conda

We recommend installing anaconda-project is a new environment, to keep things separate and clean. We’ll create an environment called project, please select another name if you already have an environment named this way:

> conda create -n project "anaconda-project>=0.11"

Now activate this environment:

> conda activate project

Step 2: Download and extract the tutorial project

The following steps will fetch and extract the latest version of the HoloViz tutorial. The tutorial files and associated conda environment will be installed in the current directory, and should not affect any other Python environments you may have.

If you are attending a live tutorial or workshop, make sure to run these steps again the day before the tutorial to ensure you have the same version of the project that the presenter will use.

> anaconda-project download pyviz/holoviz_tutorial

If you have already run this command in the current directory, you may need to remove the existing holoviz_tutorial directory before the command above will execute. Once the download is completed, change to the tutorial directory with:

> cd holoviz_tutorial

Step 3: Launch Jupyter Notebook

You can then launch the Jupyter notebook server and client:

> anaconda-project run jupyter notebook

(replacing “notebook” with “lab” if you prefer Jupyter Lab to the classic single-pane Jupyter interface).

A browser tab with a Jupyter instance should now open, letting you navigate through subdirectories and select a notebook to work on. In this case, go into the tutorial subdirectory and load index.ipynb, which will let you launch each of the tutorials and exercises.

If you don’t see Jupyter appear as a new browser tab automatically, you may need to cut and paste the URL from the console output manually.

Step 4: Download data files and test that everything is working

You can see if everything has installed correctly by selecting the Setup notebook from the index and doing “Cell/Run All” in the menus. There may be warnings on some platforms, but you’ll know it is working if you see the orange HoloViews logo after it runs hv.extension().

Running this notebook will also download the data files needed by the tutorial.

Step 5: Run the tutorials

Now you can run through the tutorials, learn how to use all these tools, and apply them to anything you need to visualize. Have fun!