Installation

SimpleITK provides a simplified interface to ITK in a variety of languages. You can either download binaries, if they are available for your platform and prefered language, or you can build SimpleITK yourself from the source code.

Additionally, there are several recommended third-party software packages.

After you have installed SimpleITK, please look to the Tutorial or the Doxygen pages for more information.

Downloading the binaries

One of the great advantages of SimpleITK is that (typically) you do not have to build it — you can simply download the binaries and get started right away!

Currently, Python binaries are available on Microsoft Windows, GNU Linux and Apple OS X. C# and Java binaries are available for Windows. We are also working towards supporting R packaging.

Python binary files

There are currently two Python binary package choices: Python Wheels, and Anaconda packages for the Anaconda Python distribution. We recommend the use of a virtual environment for installation of SimpleITK.

Wheels for Generic Python Distribution

From the command line use the pip program to install a binary wheel:

pip install SimpleITK

This installation requires a recent version of pip (>=9.0), to properly detect compatibility with the PEP 427 tags in the wheel filenames. You can update your version of pip using pip install -U pip. Also your Python environment must be compatible with one of the pre-compiled binary wheels.

Alternatively, the wheels can be manually downloaded from sourceforge or PyPI, and then installed with pip.

Conda-based distributions (Anaconda, Miniconda)

From the command line prompt, execute:

conda install -c https://conda.anaconda.org/simpleitk SimpleITK

Beta and release candidate packages are also available on Anaconda cloud under the dev label:

conda install -c https://conda.anaconda.org/simpleitk/label/dev SimpleITK

C# binary files

Binaries for select C# platforms can be found on SimpleITK’s SourceForge page under the version directory then the CSharp sub-directory. Installing the library should only involve importing the unzipped files into you C# environment. The files have the following naming convention:

SimpleITK-version-CSharp-buildplatform-targetplatform.zip

eg.

SimpleITK-1.2.0-CSharp-win32-x86.zip
SimpleITK-1.2.0-CSharp-win64-x64.zip

Details about how to set up a C# Visual Studio project with SimpleITK can be found in the Visual Guide to SimpleITK with CSharp.

More information about getting started with a sample C# program can be found in A visual guide to building SimpleITK on Linux

Java binary files

Binaries for select Java platforms can be found on SimpleITK’s SourceForge page under the version directory then the CSharp sub-directory. Installation instructions are available at a visual guide to SimpleITK in Java.

Nightly binaries

The latest binaries for the current development version of SimpleITK are also generally available. Binary packages are built as part of the nightly regression testing system. The download links are available from the CDash dashboard in the “Nightly Packages” section.

Each row on the dashboard is a SimpleITK build on a particular system, and if the build was successful there will be a package icon: https://open.cdash.org/img/package.png which links to the packages build by the system. A user may directly download the built package from such a link.