📦 Installation guide

We recommend installing Parcels (Python 3.11+) via the conda-forge package, which includes all requirements. These steps work on Linux, macOS and Windows.

Step 1: Install Miniconda (conda 4.2 or higher; update conda if needed).

Step 2: In a terminal (Linux/macOS) or the Anaconda prompt (Windows), create an environment with Parcels, cartopy and jupyter:

conda create -n parcels-v4 -c conda-forge parcels cartopy jupyter

Step 3: Activate the environment (do this each time you start a new terminal):

conda activate parcels-v4

Step 4: Get started with the quickstart tutorial, or first read about the most important Parcels concepts.

Installation of unreleased Parcels versions

To work with unreleased Parcels versions, we recommend using Pixi or uv, which both allow installing packages from Git repositories.

Here we show instructions for Pixi. cd into an empty folder:

pixi init

pixi workspace preview add pixi-build
pixi add --git 'https://github.com/Parcels-code/Parcels' --rev main parcels

# activate the environment
pixi shell

Installation for developers

We also use Pixi for our normal development. To install the latest development version, see the development section in our contributing guide.