For the past four months I've been using Anaconda's Python distribution
on my Macbook, which has been great (except for Part 1 of what has
now become a series), until I wanted to play with virtualenv. Apparently
Anaconda does not work well with virtualenv and suggests using its own
conda virtual environments and I don't take well to The Man telling me I
can't do something I want to do. So of course my reaction was to
rm -rf /anaconda.
Now I'm building my Python stack back from the ground up, and I've
decided to try out a brewed Python. I've been following these
very elegant instructions to set up numpy, scipy, etc, on OSX, and it
worked flawlessly! Until matplotlib! I had all of the dependencies
(freetype, which I installed via Homebrew, zlib, and libpng), but I kept
getting thrown this error:
fatal error: 'freetype/config/ftheader.h' file not found
#include <freetype/config/ftheader.h>
I finally found this StackOverflow discussion with the suggestion to
type this into the terminal (for brewed python):
$ ln -s /usr/local/include/freetype2/ /usr/include/freetype
And then sudo pip install matplotlib worked! I don't rigorously
understand this magic, but based on my research this creates a symbolic
link from /usr/include/freetype to /usr/local/include/freetype2
(the brewed freetype). I'm guessing that matplotlib by default was
looking for freetype in /usr/include/freetype, but it wasn't there
since Homebrew installs everything in /usr/local. So, creating the
symbolic link allowed matplotlib to find freetype. In moments like these
I'm like 'Yer a wizard, Harry.'
tags:
homebrew
matplotlib
osx
python
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