Skip to content

Installing WhiteboxTools and Numba for the QGIS Plugin

Installing WhiteboxTools and Numba

WhiteboxTools is required. Numba is optional: it speeds up the Flood tool’s raster combination step, and the plugin falls back to a pure NumPy implementation automatically if Numba is not installed.

WhiteboxTools

Download the pre-compiled executable for your platform from the official downloads page (https://www.whiteboxgeo.com/download-whiteboxtools/) or the GitHub releases page (https://github.com/jblindsay/whitebox-tools/releases). You do not need to build it from source.

Once you have the executable, either:

  • put it on your system PATH so the plugin can auto-detect it, or
  • leave it wherever you like and paste the full path into the plugin’s “WhiteboxTools executable” parameter the first time you run a SCIMAP tool (the plugin saves this path in QGIS settings and reuses it afterwards).

Windows

  1. Download the Windows build (zip) and extract it, e.g. to C:\WBT\.
  2. Confirm whitebox_tools.exe is present in that folder.
  3. Either add C:\WBT to your system PATH, or supply the full path (C:\WBT\whitebox_tools.exe) in the plugin.

macOS

  1. Download the macOS build (zip) and unzip it.
  2. Make it executable: chmod +x whitebox_tools.
  3. Gatekeeper may block the first run since the binary is unsigned. Either allow it via System Settings > Privacy & Security > “Allow Anyway” after the first blocked attempt, or clear the quarantine flag: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/whitebox_tools.
  4. Move it somewhere on PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin/), or supply the full path in the plugin.

Linux

  1. Download the Linux build (zip/tar.gz) and extract it.
  2. Make it executable: chmod +x whitebox_tools.
  3. Move it somewhere on PATH (e.g. ~/.local/bin/ or /usr/local/bin/), or supply the full path in the plugin.

Numba

Numba must be installed into the same Python environment that QGIS uses to run Processing scripts, which is often not your system/default Python. To find it, open QGIS’s Python Console (Plugins > Python Console) and run:

import sys; print(sys.executable)

Then install Numba using that interpreter.

Windows Open the OSGeo4W Shell (Start Menu > QGIS > OSGeo4W Shell) and run:

python -m pip install numba

macOS Open Terminal and run pip using the Python bundled inside the QGIS app, for example:

/Applications/QGIS.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/python3 -m pip install numba

(Confirm the exact path with the sys.executable check above, as it can vary by QGIS version/install method.)

Linux If QGIS was installed via your distro’s package manager and uses the system Python:

python3 -m pip install --user numba

If QGIS was installed via Flatpak, install inside its sandbox instead:

flatpak run --command=bash org.qgis.qgis
pip install --user numba
Tags: