Updating MNE-Python

If you want to update MNE-Python to a newer version, there are a few different options, depending on how you originally installed it.

Hint

To update via the MNE-Python installers, simply download and run the latest installer for your platform. MNE-Python will be installed in parallel to your existing installation, which you may uninstall or delete if you don’t need it anymore.

If you’re not using the MNE-Python installers, keep reading.

Upgrading MNE-Python only

If you wish to update MNE-Python only and leave other packages in their current state, you can usually safely do this with pip, even if you originally installed via conda. With the mne environment active (conda activate name_of_environment), do:

$ pip install -U mne

Upgrading all packages

Generally speaking, if you want to upgrade your whole software stack including all the dependencies, the best approach is to re-create it as a new virtual environment, because neither conda nor pip are fool-proof at making sure all packages remain compatible with one another during upgrades.

Here we’ll demonstrate renaming the old environment first, as a safety measure. We’ll assume that the existing environment is called mne and you want to rename the old one so that the new, upgraded environment can be called mne instead.

Warning

Before running the below command, ensure that your existing MNE conda environment is not activated. Run conda deactivate if in doubt.

$ conda rename --name=mne old_mne  # rename existing "mne" env to "old_mne"

Then, just follow our regular installation instructions, Install via pip or conda.

Note

If you installed extra packages into your old mne environment, you’ll need to repeat that process after re-creating the updated environment. Comparing the output of conda list --name old_mne versus conda list --name mne will show you what is missing from the new environment. On Linux, you can automate that comparison like this:

$ diff <(conda list -n mne | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort) <(conda list -n old_mne | cut -d " " -f 1 | sort) | grep "^>" | cut -d " " -f 2

Upgrading to the development version

Warning

In between releases, function and class APIs can change without warning.

Sometimes, new features or bugfixes become available that are important to your research and you just can’t wait for the next official release of MNE-Python to start taking advantage of them. In such cases, you can use pip to install the development version of MNE-Python. Ensure to activate the MNE conda environment first by running conda activate mne.

$ pip install -U --no-deps https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/archive/refs/heads/main.zip