Conda envs

You can of course install Asterix in your own python environment. However, to avoid unpredictable conflicts with other packages, we recommend the creation of a specific environment first. If you are already familiar with conda environments you can skip this section.

Conda is an open source package management system and environment management system. It quickly installs, runs and updates packages and their dependencies on your local computer and allows switches between environments.

By creating clean python environments for each of your projects (especially packages in continuous development by non developers like Asterix), you minimize the risk of of creating conflicts which will hinder the use of Asterx and/or on your other projects.

First download and install miniconda3: https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html

You can use the very useful Conda Cheat Sheet which lists the most common conda command lines you can use.

Install Asterix

First cd in the directory where you want to download Asterix. To install the most up to date developer version, clone the Asterix repository :

$ git clone https://github.com/johanmazoyer/Asterix.git

This clones the repository using HTTPS authentication. Once the repository is cloned onto your computer, type:

$ cd Asterix
$ conda env create --file environment.yml

This will automatically create a python environement named asterix with only the required python packages for Asterix, at their latest stable version. Before installing Asterix and everytime you want to use it, you need to activate this environement:

$ conda activate asterix

Now run the setup file to install Asterix. Due to the continually developing nature of Asterix, you should always use the current version of the code on GitHub, install in “develop mode” (“-e” editing option), allowing frequent updates when pulling:

$ pip install -e '.'

If you want to develop for Asterix, you might need packages to test and build the documentation. Run instead:

$  pip install -e '.[dev,docs]'

Dependencies

The installation of Asterix requires the commmon python packages, listed in the setup.py file, which are useful for most astronomical data analysis. They will be automatically installed with Asterix.

We recommend you use a version of Python > 3.10 to use Asterix. As Asterix can be computationally expensive, we recommend a powerful computer to optimize the correction. This will depend on specific test you want to perform (number of deformable mirrors, monochromatic or polychromatic correction, etc.).