Installing Scipy in Virtualenv

Question

I've tried many ways to install scipy but without successes. I use virtualenv on Linux Mate. After the workon command I tried

pip install scipy

or

easy_install scipy

end every time is a "failed with exit status 1"

I tried also

apt-get install python-scipy

and I've no errors but if I run python

python
import scipy

I'll have "ImportError: No module named scipy" What is wrong?

Answer 1

I'd suggest using Miniconda to install scipy.

wget https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
bash Miniconda-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh -b

Then, create a Conda environment with scipy installed:

conda create -n scipy scipy

Now you'll have access to the activate and deactivate scripts, used to open and close Conda environments.

$ source activate scipy
discarding /Users/username/miniconda/bin from PATH
prepending /Users/username/miniconda/envs/scipy/bin to PATH
(scipy)$ python
Python 2.7.11 |Continuum Analytics, Inc.| (default, Dec  6 2015, 18:57:58) 
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5577)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
Anaconda is brought to you by Continuum Analytics.
Please check out: http://continuum.io/thanks and https://anaconda.org
>>> import scipy
>>> scipy.version.version
'0.16.0'

---

[Edit] You indicated you want to use the system installed scipy package, that you have successfully installed via apt, in a virtualenv. You can instruct virtualenv to create a new environment that includes all the system Python packages like this:

$ virtualenv --system-site-packages scipy_env
New python executable in scipy_env/bin/python
Installing setuptools, pip...done.
$ source scipy_env/bin/activate
(scipy_env)$ python
Python 2.7.10 (default, Jul 14 2015, 19:46:27) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 6.0 (clang-600.0.39)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import scipy