The xcube software package was created for the purpose of producing, altering, examining, and sharing datacubes derived from Earth observation data. This guide aims to describe the procedure for installing and configuring xcube (and its applications) on Ubuntu 20.04.

There are several methods to install xcube, the main ones being conda and mamba. Since conda could be extremely slow, mamba is generally preferred. Mamba is a dramatically faster drop-in replacement for conda and can be installed using conda itself.

The first step consists in updating the local apt package index:

Next, create a miniconda3 directory:

Download bash script to install conda with wget. After, execute the bash script:

And add the following PATH variable:

Initialize conda:

Once Miniconda is installed, use the conda command to create a conda environment called xcube_env and install Python (>=3.9):

When the environment is installed, the following command is used to activate it:

Use conda to install mamba:

Finally, it is possible to install xcube from its conda-forge package. Starting from version 1 of xcube, the xcube installation automatically installs all plugins, such as the xcube viewer:

After xcube is successfully installed, you can use the package to create and visualize data cubes from Earth observation data. Examples on how to generate datacubes with xcube can be found here.

🔍 You will find some examples in our article How to use xcube Viewer? and also more examples will soon follow on the Jupyter Catalogue.

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