Installing Locally#

You can install nycschools for use in your own Python projects just as you would any other library, however this package also requires a local data directory to store data files.

First, optionally, create a virtualenv then install the package with pip.

pip install nycschools

Download the data files to your local project folder (where you will run you code from):

# make a local data dir
mkdir school-data

# install download and extract the 7z archive

7z x nycschools-data.7z -o./school-data/

Tip

You can install the data in any directory available with read/write access to your python programs by setting and ENV variable to the full path to the data_dir

For example:

export NYC_SCHOOLS_DATA_DIR=/opt/data/nycschools

If you are using the library in a Jupyter Notebook, you should set either export this var or set it in your Notebook using the env magic command, like this:

%env NYC_SCHOOLS_DATA_DIR=~/Documents/mydataproject/school-data