h3

H3: A Hexagonal Hierarchical Geospatial Indexing System

H3 is a geospatial indexing system using a hexagonal grid that can be (approximately) subdivided into finer and finer hexagonal grids, combining the benefits of a hexagonal grid with S2’s hierarchical subdivisions.

Documentation is available at https://h3geo.org/. Developer documentation in Markdown format is available under the dev-docs directory.

• Post bug reports or feature requests to the GitHub Issues page
• Ask questions by posting to the H3 tag on StackOverflow
• There is also an H3 Slack workspace

Installing

We recommend using prebuilt bindings if they are available for your programming language. Bindings for Java, JavaScript, Python, and others are available.

On macOS, you can install H3 using brew:

brew install h3

Otherwise, to build H3 from source, please see the following instructions.

Building from source

Still here? To build the H3 C library, you’ll need a C compiler (tested with gcc and clang), CMake, and Make. If you intend to contribute to H3, you must have clang-format installed and we recommend installing ccmake and LCOV to configure the cmake arguments to build and run the tests and generate the code coverage report. We also recommend using gcc for the code coverage as some versions of clang generate annotations that aren’t compatible with lcov. Doxygen is needed to build the API documentation.

Install build-time dependencies

• Alpine

# Installing the bare build requirements
apk add cmake make gcc libtool musl-dev

• Debian/Ubuntu

# Installing the bare build requirements
sudo apt install cmake make gcc libtool
# Installing useful tools for development
sudo apt install clang-format cmake-curses-gui lcov doxygen

• macOS (using brew)

First make sure you have the developer tools installed and then

# Installing the bare build requirements
brew install cmake
# Installing useful tools for development
brew install clang-format lcov doxygen

• Windows (Visual Studio)

You will need to install CMake and Visual Studio, including the Visual C++ compiler. For building on Windows, please follow the Windows build instructions.

• FreeBSD

# Installing the build requirements
sudo pkg install bash cmake gmake doxygen lcov

Compilation

When checking out the H3 Git repository, by default you will check out the latest development version of H3. When using H3 in an application, you will want to check out the most recently released version:

git checkout v$(