Geopandas

This is necessary to make sure that no Anaconda files are in use during the process because that could keep them from being updated.

Windows: Look in the Anaconda3 group in the Start Menu and click on the Anaconda Prompt icon. Alternatively, launch Anaconda Navigator and click on the CMD.exe Prompt tile.

Mac: Open a normal terminal window. An easy way is use Spotlight to search for "term".

Give the command:

conda install geopandas -c conda-forge

Note that there is one dash before the "c". This will install the latest version of geopandas from Anaconda's "conda-forge" channel, which contains the most recent versions of optional packages.

You'll see a message about solving the environment and there will be a long pause that may last for ten minutes or more. It will look like the process has frozen but it's actually still working. After it finishes, it should produce a bunch of new messages about changes that will be made, followed by a "Proceed?" prompt. Hit enter. There will be yet another raft of messages about changes.

It many be useful to know that the length of time the "solving" step takes differs a lot from one machine to another: it depends on your operating system, the speed of your computer, and the amounts of RAM and disk space you have. It might be a good time to take a break and do something else while it's running. If you want to make sure your computer hasn't hung, you can check using Task Manager on Windows or Activity Manager on a Mac and you should see a Python process using a lot of memory and a fair amount of CPU time.

If conda finds inconsistencies in your configuration that it can't fix, instead of a Proceed? prompt you'll see a message (possibly many lines long) explaining where it found the inconsistency. If that happens, send me a note and we'll set up a meeting to fix it.

To make sure everything worked, give the command below at the command line:

conda list geopandas

If all has gone well, it should list geopandas and geopandas-base and both should be the version 0.14.2 or later.

If that looks OK, start spyder and run the demo script from the Geopandas assignment repository. If all goes well, it should draw a plot of the boundary of Syracuse.

If geopandas didn't install cleanly and your symptoms don't match anything in the list below (or if you're not sure), send me a message on Slack to let me know what happened and I'll help you get it sorted out. Resist the temptation to Google for solutions unless you're really familiar with Anaconda. There's a lot of bad advice out there, and in the past it has often led people to make things worse.