Installing ytΒΆ
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. Installing all of these components can be a daunting task, particularly as the Python ecosystem of packages is rapidly evolving. Frankly, one of the last things a computational scientist wants to do is to install a bunch of packages and deal with the interlocking parts, when really the goal is to just simply look at some data.
To that end, the yt project provides an installation script for the toolchain upon which yt builds, which contains a fully-isolated Python + Numpy + Matplotlib + HDF5 + Mercurial installation. This installation script has been tested on most of the Teragrid as well as on a number of private clusters and Linux and OS X machines; in fact, if it doesn’t work, that’s considered a bug and we would endeavor to fix it. yt supports Linux and OSX deployment, with the possibility of deployment on other Unix-like systems. Windows is not supported.
To get the installation script, download it from:
http://hg.yt-project.org/yt/raw/stable/doc/install_script.sh
By default, it will install an array of items, with an option to also download the current stable version of Enzo. The script has all its options at the top of the script; you should be able to open it and edit it without any knowledge of bash syntax.
$ bash install_script.sh
It will start out by telling you a little bit about itself and what it’s installing, and then continue on for some time while it downloads, builds, and installs (into an isolated directory) everything you need to run yt.
Once it has completed, there will be instructions on how to set up your shell environment to use yt. You should follow these, or else yt may not work, or may simply fail – in unexpected ways!
One thing that we will use for the rest of the orientation is the environment variable YT_DEST, which is output at the end of the installation process. If you use the activate script as described in the instructions printed by the install script, you will be all set.
If you’d like to do it 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_PATH/lib and $YT_DEST/python2.7/site-packages, respectively.