How can I install Basemap in Python 3 / Matplotlib 2 on Ubuntu 16.04?

Question

I tried

pip3 install basemap

but Basemap seems not to be on PyPI.

There is an old question but it has no answer.

What I did

1. I downloaded basemap 1.07 (source)
2. Matplotlib 2, numpy 1.11, PIL, python3-dev is installed

I'm not sure where / how to get GEOS (libgeos-dev?). I think I followed the README and it didn't show any errors, but when trying the first line of this

$ python3
>>> from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap

I get

ImportError: libgeos-3.3.3.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

It is in

$ locate libgeos-3.3.3.so
/home/math/Downloads/basemap-1.0.7/geos-3.3.3/src/.libs/libgeos-3.3.3.so
/usr/local/lib/libgeos-3.3.3.so

Answer 1

Try this:

sudo apt-get install libgeos-dev

sudo pip3 install -U git+https://github.com/matplotlib/basemap.git  # latest Version from Source

Older Version might not be compatible with the matplotlib.

Answer 2

In Ubuntu, this works for me:

$ sudo apt-get install libgeos-dev
$ pip install --user https://github.com/matplotlib/basemap/archive/master.zip

For completeness, if you know you need a specific version, you can find the download links by hovering over the package/version number that you need here. For instance, if I need to install v1.1.0, I can use the above, replacing the second line with:

$ pip install --user https://github.com/matplotlib/basemap/archive/v1.1.0.zip