Install

vx CLI

The vx command-line tool lets you convert, inspect, browse, and query Vortex files from the terminal. You have the following options:

  1. Binstall (recommended) downloads a pre-built binary. Requires cargo-binstall:

cargo binstall vortex-tui

  1. pip also installs the Python library; see the Python quickstart for library usage:

pip install vortex-data

  1. uvx runs the CLI without installing. Requires uv:

uvx --from vortex-data vx --help

  1. Cargo builds from source, which can be slow due to the large dependency tree:

cargo install vortex-tui

Verify the installation:

vx --help

Using Vortex as a library

The vx CLI is the quickest way to get started, but Vortex can also be used as a library for reading, writing, and manipulating compressed arrays programmatically. See the language quickstarts for Python, Rust, and Java.

Sample data

This quickstart uses the NYC Yellow Taxi trip dataset. More months and datasets are available from the NYC TLC trip record data page.

Download a single month (~50 MB Parquet):

curl -O https://d37ci6vzurychx.cloudfront.net/trip-data/yellow_tripdata_2024-01.parquet