Installation

Requirements

The Census API requires a Linux or MacOS system with:

  • Python 3.10 to Python 3.12. Or R, supported versions TBD.

  • Recommended: >16 GB of memory.

  • Recommended: >5 Mbps internet connection.

  • Recommended: for increased performance use the API through a AWS-EC2 instance from the region us-west-2. The Census data builds are hosted in a AWS-S3 bucket in that region.

Python

(Optional) In your working directory, make and activate a virtual environment or conda environment. For example:

python -m venv ./venv
source ./venv/bin/activate

Install the cellxgene-census package via pip:

pip install -U cellxgene-census

There are also “experimental” add-on modules that are less stable than the main API, and may have more complex dependencies. To install these,

pip install -U cellxgene-census[experimental]

If installing in a Databricks notebook environment, use %pip install. Do not use %sh pip install. See the FAQ.

R

If installing from Ubuntu, you may need to install the following libraries via apt install, libxml2-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev. In addition you must have cmake v3.21 or greater.

If installing from MacOS, you will need to install the developer tools Xcode.

Windows is not supported.

From an R session, first install tiledb from R-Universe, the latest release in CRAN is not yet available.

install.packages(
  "cellxgene.census",
  repos=c('https://chanzuckerberg.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org')
)

To be able to export Census data to Seurat or SingleCellExperiment you also need to install their respective packages.

# Seurat
install.packages("Seurat")

# SingleCellExperiment
if (!require("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
    install.packages("BiocManager")

BiocManager::install("SingleCellExperiment")