Install pyCAT

Installing pyCAT from source

The latest release of pyCAT is available from https://github.com/wegener-center/pyCAT

Building and running pyCAT requires a range of other libraries and python modules. Once you have resolved all these dependencies (see details below) change to the download path and enter:

python setup.py install

Requirements

pyCAT requires Python 3.7.

Here you will find a list of external packages you will need to install before building and running pyCAT.

Many of these packages are available via a Linux package manager such as aptitude or yum. But we strongly encourage people to work within a virtual environment and install the latest stable releases of the packages using pip. In fact the easiest way uses conda as virtual environment.

The proposed installation (using conda)

Download and install conda from http://conda.pydata.org/miniconda.html.

Once conda is running you just need to create an environment, add the conda-forge channel and install the dependencies

ENV_NAME="pycat"
conda create --name $ENV_NAME python=3.7
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda activate $ENV_NAME
conda install --file conda-requirements.txt

Afterwards you can install pyCAT

python setup.py install

Installation using python-virtualenv

For a debian-based Linux distribution enter:

sudo aptitude install python-virtualenv

to install the python virtual environment. For RedHat and derived distros you will use:

sudo yum install python-virtualenv

Change to an empty directory and create the virtual environment with the following command:

virtualenv pycat

where pycat is the freely chooseable name of your environment. Afterwards activate your freshly installed environment by

source ./pycat/bin/activate

and install the following software using pip (iris dependencies):

pip install -r requirements.txt

This will install these packages along with some dependencies into pyenv.

Optional software

To use the powerful interactive shell and debugger you can install:

pip install ipython
pip install ipdb

To run the pyCAT test suite you will have to install:

pip install nose

For building the full documentation you need:

pip install Sphinx

The udunits2 library will help at the conversion of physical units. You can install it via your package manager, e.g. aptitude:

sudo aptitude install udunits-bin