Getting and Installing yt

Getting yt

yt is a Python package (with some components written in C), using NumPy as a computation engine, Matplotlib for some visualization tasks and Mercurial for version control. Because installation of all of these interlocking parts can be time-consuming, yt provides an installation script which downloads and builds a fully-isolated Python + Numpy + Matplotlib + HDF5 + Mercurial installation. yt supports Linux and OSX deployment, with the possibility of deployment on other Unix-like systems (XSEDE resources, clusters, etc.). Windows is not supported.

Since the install is fully-isolated, if you get tired of having yt on your system, you can just delete its directory, and yt and all of its dependencies will be removed from your system (no scattered files remaining throughout your system).

To get the installation script, download it from:

http://hg.yt-project.org/yt/raw/stable/doc/install_script.sh

Installing yt

By default, the bash script will install an array of items, but there are additional packages that can be downloaded and installed (e.g. SciPy, enzo, etc.). The script has all of these options at the top of the file. You should be able to open it and edit it without any knowledge of bash syntax. To execute it, run:

$ bash install_script.sh

Because the installer is downloading and building a variety of packages from source, this will likely take a while (e.g. 20 minutes), but you will get updates of its status at the command line throughout.

If you receive errors during this process, the installer will provide you with a large amount of information to assist in debugging your problems. The file yt_install.log will contain all of the STDOUT and STDERR from the entire installation process, so it is usually quite cumbersome. By looking at the last few hundred lines (i.e. tail -500 yt_install.log), you can potentially figure out what went wrong. If you have problems, though, do not hesitate to contact us for assistance.

Activating Your Installation

Once the installation has completed, there will be instructions on how to set up your shell environment to use yt by executing the activate script. You must run this script in order to have yt properly recognized by your system. You can either add it to your login script, or you must execute it in each shell session prior to working with yt.

$ source <yt installation directory>/bin/activate

If you use csh or tcsh as your shell, activate that version of the script:

$ source <yt installation directory>/bin/activate.csh

If you don’t like executing outside scripts on your computer, you can set the shell variables manually. YT_DEST needs to point to the root of the directory containing the install. By default, this will be yt-<arch>, where <arch> is your machine’s architecture (usually x86_64 or i386). You will also need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and PYTHONPATH to contain $YT_DEST/lib and $YT_DEST/python2.7/site-packages, respectively.

Alternative Installation Methods

If you want to forego the use of the install script, you need to make sure you have yt’s dependencies installed on your system. These include: a C compiler, HDF5, Freetype, libpng, python, cython, numpy, and matplotlib. From here, you can use pip (which comes with Python) to install yt as:

$ pip install yt

If you choose this installation method, you do not need to run the activation script as it is unnecessary.

Testing Your Installation

To test to make sure everything is installed properly, try running yt at the command line:

$ yt --help

If this works, you should get a list of the various command-line options for yt, which means you have successfully installed yt. Congratulations!

If you get an error, follow the instructions it gives you to debug the problem. Do not hesitate to contact us so we can help you figure it out.

Updating yt and its dependencies

With many active developers, code development sometimes occurs at a furious pace in yt. To make sure you’re using the latest version of the code, run this command at a command-line:

$ yt update

Additionally, if you want to make sure you have the latest dependencies associated with yt and update the codebase simultaneously, type this:

$ yt update --all

Removing yt and its dependencies

Because yt and its dependencies are installed in an isolated directory when you use the script installer, you can easily remove yt and all of its dependencies cleanly. Simply remove the install directory and its subdirectories and you’re done. If you really had problems with the code, this is a last defense for solving: remove and then fully re-install from the install script again.