Welcome to Sciris

What is Sciris?

Sciris is a library of tools that can help make writing scientific Python code easier and more pleasant. Built on top of NumPy and Matplotlib, Sciris provides functions covering a wide range of common math, file I/O, and plotting operations. This means you can get more done with less code, so you can spend less time looking up answers on Stack Overflow or copy-pasting dubious solutions from ChatGPT. It was originally written to help epidemiologists and neuroscientists focus on doing science, rather than on writing code, but Sciris is applicable across scientific domains (and some nonscientific ones too).

For more information, see the full documentation, the paper, or GitHub.

If you have questions, feature suggestions, or would like some help getting started, please reach out to us at or open an issue.

Installation

Using pip: pip install sciris

Using conda: conda install -c conda-forge sciris

Using uv: uv add sciris

Requires Python >= 3.10.

AI integration

Sciris has MCP servers on Context 7 and GitMCP. It also has a Claude Code plugin: to install, add this repository (https://github.com/sciris/sciris) to the Claude Code marketplace and from there install the plugin.

Tests

Sciris comes with an automated test suite covering all functions. You almost certainly don’t need to run these, but if you want to, go to the tests folder and run pytest. See the readme in that folder for more information.

Learn more

Overview

Find out more detail about the Sciris project, see some use cases, and learn about the most important features.

Tutorials

An interactive tour of Sciris’ key features, including containers, parallelization, file loading and saving, and more.

API reference

All the gory detail of every function and class.

What’s new

See what’s hot off the press.

For LLMs and tooling

The entire Sciris API — every public function and class, with its signature, summary, and aliases — is available as a single machine-readable file, following the llms.txt convention:

  • llms.txt: the compact index (~45 kB)
  • llms-full.txt: the same, plus a usage example for each function (~90 kB)
  • api.json: the same data as structured JSON, for programmatic use

All three files are generated from the source (cd docs && python make_api.py) and are verified in CI, so they never drift from the current version of Sciris.