Package Installation

Ther are different ways to install SDSS_Catl_Utils. The preferred way to install it is through pip. Another possibility is to install the package through the source code by cloning the repository from Github and build from the source code.

pip Installation

The simplest way to install SDSS_Catl_Utils is with pip. To install it with pip

pip install sdss_catl_utils

This will install the latest official release of the code.

Upgrading via pip

Whenever there is a new release, you can upgrade your current version by running

pip install --upgrade sdss_catl_utils

This will ensure that you have the most up-to-date version of SDSS_Catl_Utils.

Note

Consider installing sdss_catl_utils into a virtual environment. Setting this up is completely straightforward and takes less than a minute, even if this is your first time using a virtual environment. Using a virtual environment simplifies not just the current installation but also package upgrades and your subsequent workflow. If you use conda to manage your python distribution, you can find explicit instructions in the Installing SDSS_Catl_Utils using a virtual environment section of the documentation.

Building from Source

If you don’t install the latest release using pip, you can instead clone the source code and call the setup file. This is the most common way to install SDSS_Catl_Utils if you want versions of the code that have been updated since the last latest official release. In this case, after installation, it is particularly important that you follow the instructions in Verifying your installation section bellow.

The first step is to clone the SDSS_Catl_Utils repository

git clone https://github.com/vcalderon2009/sdss_catl_utils
cd sdss_catl_utils

Installing one of the official releases

All oficial releases of the code are tagged with their version name, e.g. v0.1.0 pertains to the 0.1.0 release. To install a particular release

git checkout v0.1.0
python setup.py install

This will install the v0.1.0 release of the SDSS_Catl_Utils. Other official release version can be installed similarly.

Installing the most recent master branch

If you prefer to use the most recent version of the code

git checkout master
python setup.py install

This will install the master branch of the code, which is the branch currently under development. While the features in the officiail releases have a stable API, new features being developed in the master branch may not. However, the master branch may have new features and/or perfomance enhancements that you may wish to use for your science applications. A concerted effort is made to ensure that only thoroughly tested and documented code appears in the public master branch, though SDSS_Catl_Utils users should be awayre of the distinction between the bleeding edge version in master and the official release version available through pip.

Dependencies

If your install sdss_catl_utils using pip, then most of your dependencies will be handled for you automatically. The only additional dependency you may need is:

  • h5py : 2.5 or later

The h5py package is used for fast I/O of galaxy and group catalogues.

If you did not use pip, then you should be aware of the following strict requirements:

Any of the above can be installed with either pip or conda.

Verifying your installation

After installing the code and its dependencies, fire up a Python interpreter and check that the version number matches what you expect:

>>> import sdss_catl_utils
>>> print(sdss_catl_utils.__version__)

If the version number is not what it should be, this likely means you have a previous installation that is superseding the version you tried to install. This should be accomplished by doing pip uninstall sdss_catl_utils before your new installation, but you may need to uninstall the previous build “manually”. Like all python packages, you can find the installation location as follows:

>>> import sdss_catl_utils
>>> print(sdss_catl_utils.__file__)

This wil show where your active version is located on your machine. You can manually delete this copy of SDSS_Catl_Utils prior to your new installation to avoid version conflicts. (There may be multiple copies of SDSS_Catl_Utils in this location, depending on how many times you have previously installed the code - all such copies my be deleted prior to reinstallation).