Installation

Release version

irispy-lmsal is part of the wider ecosystem of scientific Python packages for solar physics and therefore a working installation is more about installing the scientific Python ecosystem. If you do not currently have a working scientific Python distribution this guide will set you up with the Miniconda, which makes it easy to install and manage your scientific Python packages.

To install the Miniconda Python distribution follow the instructions. Although Miniconda makes it simple to switch between Python versions, we recommend that new users install the latest Python 3.x version of Miniconda.

The reason we choose Miniconda over Anaconda, is mainly due to the size as Anaconda comes with a full install of packages you probably do not need and this way you have more direct control over what has been installed into your Python virtual environment. Furthermore, you bypass the need for the conda resolver to sort out your root environment which should make conda faster to use.

Using Miniconda

To install, launch a system command prompt or the ‘Anaconda Prompt’ (under Windows). First configure conda for to add the conda-forge channel:

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --set channel_priority strict

and now to install irispy-lmasl within the default conda virtual environment:

$ conda install irispy-lmsal

This will install irispy-lmsal and every package it needs to function.

Note

We strongly recommend using a Python virtual environment or a conda virtual environment.

Updating

You can update to the latest version by running:

conda update irispy-lmsal

Development version

This section outlines how to install the development version of irispy-lmsal.

Stable Dependencies Install

Create a conda environment

The first step is to create a conda environment (let’s call it irispy-dev) in which to install the development version of irispy-lmsal. This will allow you to keep your root environment clean of development packages. From the command line, type:

conda create -n irispy-dev pip

This creates the irispy-dev conda environment with just pip. Next, you must activate that environment, i.e., switch into it.

conda activate irispy-dev

Clone irispy-lmsal repository

Now we need to clone the irispy repository from GitLab into a directory called irispy-git. From the directory in which you want irispy-git to reside, type:

git clone https://gitlab.com/LMSAL_HUB/iris_hub/irispy-lmsal irispy-git

If you want to develop irispy-lmsal, we suggest forking the repository on GitLab and using that in the clone step above.

Install irispy-lmsal

Finally, we can install the development version.

cd irispy-git
pip install -e ".[dev]"

You should now be ready to use irispy-lmsal. To check it’s installed, open an Python/IPython/Jupyter Notebook session from any directory and try:

import irispy

To make sure you have the latest updates, regularly do

git pull origin master

Development dependencies

We installed the stable versions of many packages. If you want to install development versions of any package you can do the following steps:

  • Git clone the source code of the package into a directory called package-name-git. e.g., git clone https://github.com/sunpy/sunraster.git sunraster-git

  • Change into the directory package-name-git. e.g., cd sunraster-git

  • Install it using pip install -e ..