Pytesseract : "TesseractNotFound Error: tesseract is not installed or it's not in your path", how do I fix this?

Question

I see steps are scattered in different answers. Based on my recent experience with this pytesseract error on Windows, writing different steps in sequence to make it easier to resolve the error:

1. Install tesseract using windows installer available at: https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki

2. Note the tesseract path from the installation. Default installation path at the time of this edit was: C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\Tesseract-OCR. It may change so please check the installation path.

3. pip install pytesseract

4. Set the tesseract path in the script before calling image_to_string:

pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = r'C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe'

First you should install binary:

On Linux

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libleptonica-dev 
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-dev
sudo apt-get install libtesseract-dev

On Mac

brew install tesseract

On Windows

download binary from https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki. then add pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe' to your script.

Then you should install python package using pip:

pip install tesseract
pip install tesseract-ocr

references: https://pypi.org/project/pytesseract/ (INSTALLATION section) and https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/wiki#installation

For Windows Only

1 - You need to have Tesseract OCR installed on your computer.

get it from here. https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/tesseract/wiki

Download the suitable version.

2 - Add Tesseract path to your System Environment. i.e. Edit system variables.

3 - Run pip install pytesseract and pip install tesseract

4 - Add this line to your python script every time

pytesseract.pytesseract.tesseract_cmd = 'C:/OCR/Tesseract-OCR/tesseract.exe'  # your path may be different

5 - Run the code.

This error is because tesseract is not installed on your computer.

If you are using Ubuntu install tesseract using following command:

sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr

For mac:

brew install tesseract