Introduction

pygris is a Python package to help users access US Census Bureau TIGER/Line and cartographic boundary shapefiles and load them into Python as GeoDataFrames. The goal of the package is to make it simple to access US Census geographic data; data can be acquired with a single function for a given geography (e.g. tracts() for Census tracts) along with a few options.

The package is a general port of the R tigris package with a few modifications. The framework of and philosophy behind the tigris package is covered in Chapter 5 of my book, Analyzing US Census Data: Methods, Maps and Models in R.

Install pygris from PyPI with the following command:

pip install pygris

# For optional dependencies to support interactive examples in the documentation:
# pip install pygris[explore]

Alternatively, install the development version from GitHub:

pip install git+https://github.com/walkerke/pygris.git

Support for installation with conda is forthcoming.

Read the following articles for more information on how to use the package:

• Basic usage of pygris
• Working with geometries in pygris
• Data utilities in pygris
• Geocoding and custom filters in pygris