Ouster SDK Installation

Please proceed to the instructions for your programming language and platform of choice.

Python

Supported Platforms

Pre-built binaries are provided on PyPI for the following platforms:

  • Most glibc-based Linux distributions on x86_64 and ARM64 platforms (manylinux2010_x86_64, manylinux2014_aarch64)

  • macOS >= 10.15 on x86_64 platforms (macosx_10_15_x86_64)

  • macOS >= 11.0 on Apple M1 for Python >= 3.8 (macosx_11_0_arm64)

  • Windows 10 on x86_64 platforms (win_amd64)

Building from source is supported on:

  • Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, and Debian 11 (x86-64, aarch64)

  • macOS >= 11.0 (arm64, x86-64)

  • Windows 10 (x86-64)

The Ouster SDK drops languages and platforms as they exit their standard support cycle. Please follow our Lifecycle Policy page to understand when support for a Python version, C++ compiler, Operating System, or Sensor FW may dropped from support.

Installation

The Ouster Python SDK binary packages require Python >= 3.8 and pip >= 19.0 on most platforms. On Ubuntu 18.04, the default Python 3 version is is 3.6, so you’ll have to install and use python3.8 explicitly. On Apple M1, you’ll need need Python >= 3.8.

Note

Using a virtual environment with the Ouster Python SDK is recommended. Users newer to Python should read the official venv instructions and ensure that they upgrade pip after activating their venv. If you’re using venv on Windows, you’ll want to use python and pip instead of py -3 and py -3 -m pip in the following Powershell snippets.

Note

Python 3 when installed with macOS Developer Tools uses LibreSSL 2.8.3 (or an older version.) OusterSDK, like many Python 3-compatible packages, requires urllib3 which is not compatible with LibreSSL and requires OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer. To account for this, macOS users should install an official distribution of Python 3 or one provided by Homebrew, as these use OpenSSL 1.1.1 or newer. In either case, installing OusterSDK into a Python 3 virtual enviroment is still recommended.

If you’re using an unsupported platform like a non-glibc-based Linux distribution, or wish to modify the Ouster Python SDK, you will need to build from source. See the build instructions for requirements needed to build from a source distribution or from a clone of the repository.

To install on supported platforms, first make sure you have the latest version of pip and setuptools:

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools

Now that your Python environment has an up-to-date pip, you can install ouster-sdk:

$ python3 -m pip install 'ouster-sdk[examples]'

Note

While the optional examples component is not required for ouster-sdk, we recommend installing it so you can run the various examples.

To check that you’ve successfully installed the latest version of the Ouster Python SDK, run the following command and make sure that the ouster-sdk package is included in the output:

$ python3 -m pip list

You should see something like:

ouster-sdk                    0.11.1

Now you can visually confirm your installation with Download and Visualize Sample Data!

What’s Next

To get a feel for working with the Ouster Sensor Python API, check out the following sections:

C++

The Ouster C++ SDK currently must be built and installed from sources. Please refer to Building the C++ Client from Source.

ROS

Ouster ROS driver code has been moved out to a separate GitHub repository. To get started using the driver follow the instructions provided on the repository’s main page: https://github.com/ouster-lidar/ouster-ros