How to Check if NumPy is Installed and Find Your NumPy Version

The numpy Python module is widely used for many different analyses and as a dependency for many other Python packages. In many instances, it is necessary to determine if numpy is installed and which numpy version is installed. This article will show you multiple ways to determine your numpy version and installation status.

Check if numpy is installed

Here are three ways to check if numpy, or any other Python package, is installed. Note, that some of these methods also tell you the numpy version.

1. In an interactive Python session

The first way to check if numpy is installed is to start an interactive Python session. You do this by opening up a command prompt/terminal, typing python, and pressing ‘Enter’.

You should now see something that shows information about the Python distribution you are using, followed by three greater-than signs. Like this:

Python 3.8.8 (default, Apr 13 2021, 15:08:03) [MSC v.1916 64 bit (AMD64)] :: Anaconda, Inc. on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

The >>> indicates that the code you type will be executed by the Python interpreter.

To check if numpy is installed just try to import it with the following line of code. Then press ‘Enter’.

import numpy

If there is no error message then it means numpy is installed. If you get an error message like the one below it means that numpy is not installed or that it was improperly installed.

>>> import numpy
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'numpy'
>>>

To exit the interactive Python session simply type quit() and press enter.

2. With pip show

You can also check your numpy installation with pip, a Python package manager/installer. To do so, make sure your are not in an interactive Python session. Then type the following command in the command prompt and press ‘Enter’.

python -m pip show numpy

If numpy is installed you will see a message like this:

Name: numpy
Version: 1.20.1
Summary: NumPy is the fundamental package for array computing with Python.
Home-page: https://www.numpy.org
Author: Travis E. Oliphant et al.
Author-email: None
License: BSD
Location: c:\users\konrad\anaconda3\lib\site-packages
Requires:
Required-by: tifffile, tables, statsmodels, seaborn, scipy, scikit-learn, scikit-image, PyWavelets, pyerfa, patsy, pandas, numexpr, numba, mkl-random, mkl-fft, matplotlib, imageio, imagecodecs, h5py, Bottleneck, bokeh, bkcharts, astropy

If numpy is not installed you will see a message like this.

WARNING: Package(s) not found: numpy

If you have both Python2 and Python3 installed you will need to replace python with python3 when referencing the Python3 installation.

3. With conda list

If you are using an Anaconda Python distribution you can check for a numpy installation using the conda command. First, open up the Anaconda Prompt. They type the following and press ‘Enter’.

conda list numpy

If numpy is installed you will get a message like this.

(base) C:\Users\Konrad>conda list numpy
# packages in environment at C:\Users\Konrad\anaconda3:
#
# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
numpy                     1.20.1           py38h34a8a5c_0
numpy-base                1.20.1           py38haf7ebc8_0
numpydoc                  1.1.0              pyhd3eb1b0_1

If numpy is not installed you will see an empty result, like this.

(base) C:\Users\Konrad>conda list numpy
# packages in environment at C:\Users\Konrad\anaconda3:
#
# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
(base) C:\Users\Konrad>

Check Your `numpy version

Once you’ve determined that numpy is installed you can check your numpy version. I will show you three ways to check your numpy version. Note that two of them are the same as shown above.

1. With numpy

You can check your numpy version by opening an interactive Python session, importing numpy and use numpy.__version__ to check the version, as shown below.

>>> import numpy
>>> numpy.__version__
'1.20.1'

2. With pip show

Above we used pip show to determine if numpy was installed. You may have noticed, that the result also showed the package version.

Type python -m pip show and press ‘Enter’. The result will show the package version and other information about the package.

3. With conda list

We also used conda list above to check the numpy installation. Once again, you may have noticed this command also gave information about the numpy version.

Make sure you are using the Anaconda prompt, as the conda command only works in an Anaconda environment, and type conda list numpy. The result will show the version of numpy and associated packages.

Conclusion

That’s it. Now you know how to check your numpy version and installation status in a number of ways. If you would like a visual walk-through, check out the video below.