haversine

What it is and what it does

Haversine is a lightweight Python library that computes the shortest distance between two points on Earth given their latitude and longitude coordinates. It implements the haversine formula, which calculates great-circle distances on a sphere, and supports output in kilometers, meters, miles, nautical miles, feet, inches, radians, and degrees. The package also provides an inverse haversine function to find a destination point given a starting point, distance, and direction.

The core use case is straightforward: pass two (lat, lon) tuples and get a distance back. For bulk operations, the library offers a vector mode that can compute distances between multiple point pairs; this mode optionally uses NumPy for performance and can be further accelerated with Numba and icc_rt. The package is pure Python with no mandatory dependencies, making it easy to integrate into any project that needs basic geographic distance calculations.

Use it for:

• Calculate driving or travel distances between cities or landmarks for routing or trip planning applications.
• Filter nearby locations from a database by computing distances from a user's current position.
• Batch-compute pairwise distances between many geographic points for clustering or spatial analysis.
• Validate geographic coordinates or detect anomalies by checking distances between consecutive GPS readings.
• Find the closest facility (store, hospital, etc.) to a given location by comparing distances to multiple candidates.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Calculates great-circle distances between geographic coordinates on Earth using the haversine formula, supporting multiple distance units and optional vector operations.

Yes. Haversine is a stable, dependency-free library for a common task. It has no known vulnerabilities, permissive licensing, and low install friction. The aging maintenance status (624 days since last release) is not a blocker for a mature, narrow-scope library—the formula itself does not change. Install it if you need to calculate distances between geographic coordinates; skip it only if you require more advanced geodetic calculations or are already using a larger geospatial framework.

Install

haversine on PyPI

pip install haversine

uv add haversine

poetry add haversine

Installing haversine

Before you install

Low friction: pure Python wheel with no runtime dependencies. Maintenance status is aging—last release was 624 days ago, though the repository remains active with recent commits and the package is marked Production/Stable.

License in practice

MIT license is permissive; you can use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial and private projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart

pip install haversine

from haversine import haversine, Unit

lyon = (45.7597, 4.8422)
paris = (48.8567, 2.3508)
distance_km = haversine(lyon, paris)
distance_mi = haversine(lyon, paris, unit=Unit.MILES)

Latitude must be in range [-90, 90] and longitude in range [-180, 180]; values outside these ranges will raise an error unless the normalize parameter is used.

Verify before relying

• Accuracy of haversine formula results compared to other geodetic methods for long distances or polar regions.
• Performance characteristics of vector operations without optional numba and icc_rt dependencies installed.
• Whether the package handles edge cases like antipodal points or coordinates at the poles correctly.

Package facts

Evidence: haversine-2.9.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Tags

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