h5py Installation issue

[Kieran Short]

Hi all,

Please be gentle!

I'm having issues trying to install h5py on a Win7/64 machine running Anaconda 2.1.0 (64-bit), Python 2.7.6. Numpy is version 1.9.0.

If I download the h5py installer (h5py-2.4.0.win32-py2.7.exe), as per installation instructions on http://www.h5py.org/ I think everything installs fine (no alerts or anything), but as soon as I try to import the h5py module, I get hit with:

ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 is not a valid Win32 application.

i.e.

============================

Python 2.7.6 |Anaconda 2.1.0 (64-bit)| (default, May 27 2014, 15:00:33) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

Anaconda is brought to you by Continuum Analytics.

Please check out: http://continuum.io and https://binstar.org

>>> import h5py

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

  File "C:\Users\kshort\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda\lib\site-packages\h5py\__init__.py", line 10, in <module>

    from h5py import _errors

ImportError: DLL load failed: %1 is not a valid Win32 application.

>>>

============================

So there is some sort of incompatiblity, but I'm not sure where. Odd, as far as I can tell I've done everything I should as per: "Installing On Windows".

Anyway, I thought I'd just try and do a pip install instead, but that is also falling over:

pip install -U h5py

see attached h5py_pip.txt for the stdout

the fatality in the build is that it can't build the h5py.defs extension because hdf5.h cannot be found.

I'd like to be able to get h5py working, but I'm at a loss as to what the underlying issues are here.

Any help would be most appreciated.

cheers,

Kieran

[Andrew Collette]

Hi Kieran,

> I'm having issues trying to install h5py on a Win7/64 machine running
> Anaconda 2.1.0 (64-bit), Python 2.7.6. Numpy is version 1.9.0.

If you are using Anaconda, you should install the version of h5py
packaged by the Anaconda devs; e.g. "conda install h5py". The vanilla
Windows installers are unlikely to work; installing from source via
pip certainly won't work without a development copy of HDF5.

Andrew

[Kieran Short]

Thanks Andrew this works.

I've edited the windows installation instructions on GitHub and made a pull request, if it helps.

cheers,

Kieran