Installation

The easiest way to install Elephant is by creating a conda environment, followed by pip install elephant. Below is the explanation of how to proceed with these two steps.

Prerequisites

Elephant requires Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, or 3.8.

(recommended) Conda (Linux/MacOS/Windows)

Debian/Ubuntu

1. Create your conda environment (e.g., elephant_env):

   conda create --name elephant_env python=3.7 numpy scipy tqdm
   

2. Activate your environment:

   conda activate elephant_env
   

Open a terminal and run:

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-numpy python-scipy python-pip python-six python-tqdm

Installation

Stable release version

Development version

The easiest way to install Elephant is via pip:

pip install elephant

To upgrade to a newer release use the --upgrade flag:

pip install --upgrade elephant

If you do not have permission to install software systemwide, you can install into your user directory using the --user flag:

pip install --user elephant

To install Elephant with all extra packages, do:

pip install elephant[extras]

If you have Git installed on your system, it is also possible to install the development version of Elephant.

1. Before installing the development version, you may need to uninstall the previously installed version of Elephant:

   pip uninstall elephant
   

2. Clone the repository and install the local version:

   git clone git://github.com/NeuralEnsemble/elephant.git
   cd elephant
   pip install -e .
   

Dependencies

The following packages are required to use Elephant (refer to requirements for the exact package versions):

• numpy - fast array computations
• scipy - scientific library for Python
• quantities - support for physical quantities with units (mV, ms, etc.)
• neo - electrophysiology data manipulations
• tqdm - progress bar
• six - Python 2 and 3 compatibility utilities

These packages are automatically installed when you run pip install elephant.

The following packages are optional in order to run certain parts of Elephant:

• pandas - for the pandas_bridge module
• scikit-learn - for the ASSET analysis
• nose - for running tests
• numpydoc and sphinx - for building the documentation

These and above packages are automatically installed when you run pip install elephant[extras].