Installing Asimov
There are lots of ways of installing asimov, and the best way of getting access to it depends both on your local setup, and on whether you have access to IGWN computing resources.
asimov was initially designed for use in analysing gravitational wave detector data, and so some of the information in this manual will be aimed directly at users from that background.
Note
We generally recommend installing asimov using conda, as this will give you access to all of the other packages it works with most easily.
Installation using conda
asimov is packaged and available for use in conda environments via conda-forge.
Because asimov is designed to work with many other packages it is normally easiest to create a new conda environment using our environment specification file:
$ conda create --name asimov --file https://git.ligo.org/asimov/asimov/-/raw/master/conda/environment.txt
where you can choose whatever name you wish to replace asimov in the --name option.
Alternatively you can install into an existing conda environment from conda forge.
You can do this by ensuring that your conda environment is activated, and then running
$ conda install -c conda-forge asimov
Installation using pip
The simplest method for installing asimov is to use the latest released version from pypi, the python package index.
We always recommend installing in a virtual environment.
To create a new virtual environment you can run
$ mkdir environment
$ python -m venv environment
You can then “activate” the environment by running
$ source environment/bin/activate
You’ll need to run this activation step each time you open a new terminal when you want to use asimov.
You can then install asimov using pip.
Installation from source
If you want to run unreleased code you can do this by installing directly from the asimov git repository.
The quickest way to do this is to run
$ pip install git+https://git.ligo.org/asimov/asimov.git
You should use the package with care if installing from source; while the master branch should represent stable code, it may contain new or undocumented features, or behave unexpectedly.
Installation for development
If you want to develop code in the asimov repository then it can be helpful to install in development mode.
First clone a copy of the asimov repository, for example by running
$ git clone https://git.ligo.org/asimov/asimov.git
Then you can install this repository into your current virtual environment by running
$ cd asimov
$ pip install -e .
Using an IGWN Environment
If you have access to IGWN compute facilities, such as the LIGO Data Grid, then you can use an IGWN environment to run asimov.
Asimov is pre-installed in both testing and deployed environments, so you should be able to access it on the cluster simply by activating one of these environments.
For example,
$ conda activate igwn-py39