Environment Variables#

The following environment variables can be used to affect the behavior of PyArrow.

ARROW_HOME#

The base path to the PyArrow installation. This variable overrides the default computation of library paths in introspection functions such as get_library_dirs().

ARROW_PRE_0_15_IPC_FORMAT#

If this environment variable is set to a non-zero integer value, the PyArrow IPC writer will default to the pre-0.15 Arrow IPC format. This behavior can also be enabled using IpcWriteOptions.use_legacy_format.

ARROW_PRE_1_0_METADATA_VERSION#

If this environment variable is set to a non-zero integer value, the PyArrow IPC writer will write V4 Arrow metadata (corresponding to pre-1.0 Arrow with an incompatible Union data layout). This behavior can also be enabled using IpcWriteOptions.metadata_version.

PKG_CONFIG#

The path to the pkg-config executable. This may be required for proper functioning of introspection functions such as get_library_dirs() if pkg-config is not available on the system PATH.