Installation

LOTUS can be installed as a Python library through pip or uv.

Requirements

OS: MacOS, Linux
Python: 3.10

Install with uv (Recommended)

For the latest stable release:

# Install uv if you haven't already
$ curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# Create a new project or navigate to your existing project
$ uv add lotus-ai

For the latest features:

$ uv add git+https://github.com/lotus-data/lotus.git@main

Install with pip

For the latest stable release:

$ conda create -n lotus python=3.10 -y
$ conda activate lotus
$ pip install lotus-ai

For the latest features:

$ conda create -n lotus python=3.10 -y
$ conda activate lotus
$ pip install git+https://github.com/lotus-data/lotus.git@main

Optional Subpackages

LOTUS supports optional subpackages for extended functionality. Install them using the lotus-ai[<subpackage>] syntax:

$ pip install "lotus-ai[serpapi]"

Or with uv:

$ uv add "lotus-ai[serpapi]"

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of available subpackages:

serpapi — Web search via Google and Google Scholar using the SerpAPI
arxiv — Fetching and searching papers from arXiv
pubmed — Searching and extracting biomedical literature via PubMed
file_extractor — Extracting text from PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint files, and more via DirectoryReader
weaviate — Integration with the Weaviate vector database
qdrant — Integration with the Qdrant vector database
data_connectors — Connecting to SQL databases and AWS S3 via SQLAlchemy and boto3
web_search — Web search support via You.com and Tavily

Running on Mac

If you are running on Mac and using pip, please install Faiss via conda:

# CPU-only version
$ conda install -c pytorch faiss-cpu=1.8.0

# GPU(+CPU) version
$ conda install -c pytorch -c nvidia faiss-gpu=1.8.0

If you’re using uv, the faiss-cpu dependency will be handled automatically.

For more details, see Installing FAISS via Conda.