Get Started

FireDucks is released on pypi.org under the 3-Clause BSD License (the Modified BSD License).

Install

FireDucks is currently available for Linux (manylinux) on the x86_64 architecture and MacOS on the ARM architecture. It can be simply installed using pip as follows:

pip install fireducks

Please make sure you are using Python >3.8, <=3.13, otherwise you may encounter error saying: “No matching distribution found for fireducks”.

⚠ Since FireDucks 1.1.0, we have upgraded dependent pyarrow to 18.0.0. Therefore, python 3.8 is no longer supported.

Windows versions are under development. At this moment, if you are working on Windows system, you may like to consider using FireDucks from WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Usage

FireDucks provides two types of usage: Import Hook and Explicit Import.

Import Hook

FireDucks provides an import hook utility. This utility runs the given Python script by automatically replacing import pandas statement with FireDucks. So this utility enables you to use FireDucks for your existing program as it is. The import hook can be activated by Python interpreter’s -m option as follows.

python3 -m fireducks.pandas your_script.py

For IPython/Jupyter Notebook, a magic command is available as follows.

%load_ext fireducks.pandas
import pandas as pd

This is very useful when your program includes many Python scripts which import pandas internally. You don’t need to replace individual import statements from those scripts manually.

If you use any external libraries (like matplotlib etc.) which may internally use pandas DataFrame, please make sure to enable the hook to avoid any unintended executional issues.

📢 The import hook feature has changed its name to fireducks.pandas from FireDucks 0.11.0. An old module name fireducks.imhook is also available as an alias.

Explicit Import

FireDucks has pandas-like module fireducks.pandas which can be imported instead of pandas. If you want to use FireDucks for an existing pandas program, replace the import statement as follows.

# import pandas as pd
import fireducks.pandas as pd