The Full Monty installers give you the whole scientific Python stack in one easy-to-swallow installer package for OSX.
We recommend you use these installers with Python from the Python.org installers. First install Python.org Python, then download and install from the disk images here.
You can also use these disk images to install on homebrew and macports using the command line – see the README file on the disk images for instructions.
Please don’t use the Python that comes with OSX, it will cause you no end of problems with scientific Python packages.
Other free OSX installer bundles that you might consider are:
As for Anaconda and Canopy, you’ll like the Full Monty installer if you want a double-click installer that will install the standard scientific Python packages in one go. Like Anaconda and Canopy, you do not need a compiler for the install, although you probably will want to install the Xcode command line tools at some point in your scientific Python career.
If you are already using the standard Python.org Python, then the Full Monty might be a good option, because it installs into the Python.org Python directories, rather than the Anaconda and Canopy approach of installing into an alternative build of Python. If you are using homebrew or macports, you might like the fact that you can use the Full Monty disk image as a source of packages to install into homebrew or macports Python.
Anaconda and Canopy contain many more packages than just the scientific Python stack, so if you want to install large packages like PyQt or VTK then you will probably prefer something like Anaconda or Canopy.
You might or might not like the fact that the Full Monty is entirely supported with volunteer effort and has no ties to a company. It is built from the public binary packages available from the Python Package index.
The Full Monty installer uses the pip tool to do the all the work of installing the component Python packages. Pip is the standard package installer for Python, recommended by the Python packaging authority. The Full Monty will install pip for you, if you don’t have it, and upgrade pip to the latest version if you do.
You can always do something very similar to the Full Monty installer using the pip command line, but the installer means you can download a single disk image file that contains a set of packages that are known to work together.
How do we know they work together? Because we test them automatically using the Travis public testing service - see wheels2dmg on travis-ci.
Anyone is welcome to come help maintain these installers. We build them with the wheels2dmg package, available on Github, and use the standard Python Packaging Authority wheels binary package format for the component packages.
The list of packages comes from the wheels2dmg travis configuration:
The packages are:
If you need anything else, you can usually install it with pip. Say you want the scikit-learn machine learning package. First run the Full Monty installer, then open Terminal.app and run:
pip install scikit-learn
It is the usual OSX install routine:
Please drop us a line on the wheels2dmg issue tracker and we’ll do our best to help.