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Introduction

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Tutorials

Installation

Gensim is known to run on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and should run on any other platform that supports Python 2.5 and NumPy. Gensim depends on the following software:

  • 3.0 > Python >= 2.5. Tested with versions 2.5 and 2.6.
  • NumPy >= 1.0.4. Tested with version 1.5.0rc1, 1.4.0, 1.3.0rc2 and 1.0.4.
  • SciPy >= 0.6. Tested with version 0.8.0, 0.8.0b1, 0.7.1 and 0.6.0.

Install Python

Check what version of Python you have with:

python --version

You can download Python 2.5 from http://python.org/download.

Note

Gensim requires Python 2.5 or greater and will not run under earlier versions.

Install SciPy & NumPy

These are quite popular Python packages, so chances are there are pre-built binary distributions available for your platform. You can try installing from source using easy_install:

sudo easy_install numpy
sudo easy_install scipy

If that doesn’t work or if you’d rather install using a binary package, consult http://www.scipy.org/Download.

Install gensim

You can now install (or upgrade) gensim with:

sudo easy_install --upgrade gensim

That’s it! Congratulations, you can proceed to the tutorials.


If you also want to run the algorithms over a cluster of computers, in Distributed Computing, you should install with:

sudo easy_install gensim[distributed]

The optional distributed feature installs Pyro (PYthon Remote Objects). If you don’t know what distributed computing means, you can ignore it: gensim will work fine for you anyway. This optional extension can also be installed separately later with:

sudo easy_install Pyro

There are also alternative routes to install:

  1. If you have downloaded and unzipped the tar.gz source for gensim (or you’re installing gensim from github), you can run:

    sudo python setup.py install

    to install gensim into your site-packages folder.

  2. If you wish to make local changes to the gensim code (gensim is, after all, a package which targets research prototyping and modifications), a preferred way may be installing with:

    sudo python setup.py develop

    This will only place a symlink into your site-packages directory. The actual files will stay wherever you unpacked them.

  3. If you don’t have root priviledges (or just don’t want to put the package into your site-packages), simply unpack the source package somewhere and that’s it! No compilation or installation needed. Just don’t forget to set your PYTHONPATH (or modify sys.path), so that Python can find the unpacked package when importing.

Testing gensim

To test the package, unzip the tar.gz source and run:

python setup.py test

Contact

Use the gensim discussion group for any questions and troubleshooting. For private enquiries, you can also send me an email to the address at the bottom of this page.