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