Installation

Starfish supports python 3.6 and above (python 3.7 recommended). To install the starfish package, first verify that your python version is compatible. You can check this by running python --version.

The output should look similar to this:

$ python --version
Python 3.7.7

Warning

While starfish itself has no known issues with python 3.8, scikit-image is not fully compatible with python 3.8. As such, installation of scikit-image, as part of starfish installation, may unexpectedly fail. The workaround is to install numpy first before installing starfish or scikit-image.

Using virtual environments

Starfish lists minimum versions for its dependencies for access to new features and algorithms. These more up-to-date packages may create conflicts in your existing scripts or other packages, so we recommend using a virtualenv. You can create a work folder and set up the virtual environment like:

$ mkdir starfish
$ cd starfish
$ python -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate

Conda users can set one up like so:

$ conda create -n starfish "python=3.7"
$ conda activate starfish

Installing starfish

Starfish can easily be installed using pip:

$ pip install starfish

Note

If using python 3.8, first install numpy using pip before installing starfish.

To use napari for interactive image visualization via display() you must also install napari:

$ pip install starfish[napari]

Interactive visualization with napari also requires using Qt (e.g. by running the magic command %gui qt in a jupyter notebook or ipython shell.)

Installing starfish on Windows

Windows users can install starfish in the same way. Again, we recommend using a conda or virtual environment with python 3.7. Here is how you would install starfish in a virtual environment created with python’s venv module:

> mkdir starfish
> cd starfish
> python -m venv .venv
> .venv\Scripts\activate.bat
> pip install starfish
> pip install starfish[napari]

Note

Python 3.8 has trouble installing scikit-image v0.15.0 and the pip install numpy workaround does not solve this issue on Windows.

Jupyter notebook

To run starfish in a jupyter notebook (recommended for creating an image processing pipeline) add the virtualenv kernel to jupyter by activating your virtual environment and then:

$ python -m ipykernel install --user --name=<venv_name>

Now you should be able to select venv_name as the kernel in a jupyter notebook to have access to the starfish library.