How to install ViTables?

Question

I am trying to install ViTables 3 (an HDF5 file viewer) on MacOS X 10.9.5 with Python 3.6 using the following command:

pip3 install ViTables-3.0.0-py3-none-any.whl

It installs just fine but it still won't start, yielding the following error instead:

qtpy.PythonQtError: No Qt bindings could be found

I have tried the following to fix this with no luck

brew install pyqt5

brew install pyqt

Any ideas about how to fix this actually?

I have also installed Anaconda just for this and tried installing ViTables with conda (conda install -c conda-forge vitables) but it doesn't work this way too, although the error (shown when I try to run ViTables, the installation process seems to complete without errors) is different:

pkg_resources.DistributionNotFound: The 'ViTables==3.0.0' distribution was not found and is required by the application

PS: I've also tried HDFView but it says there's not enough memory to open the file I need (I am almost sure ViTables will manage - it opens the same file just fine on a much older Linux machine).

Answer 1

I don't know about the pip error and cannot check it because I've no OS X boxes available.

Regarding the conda error it is almost sure the well known conflict between pyqt5 pip package and pyqt5 conda package. A workaround is simply remove the PyQt5 dependency from the file Anaconda3\pkgs\vitables-3.0.0-0\Lib\site-packages\ViTables-3.0.0.egg-info\requires.txt (I don't know if the path is the same on Mac OS X).

You can found it explained with some more detail in the ViTables FAQ.