Framework installation

Note: These instructions were developed and tested using Ubuntu 10.04 Server. They assume the user is using the bash shell. Adjustment for other systems should be straightforward.

Before starting, you will need to install the lofar.parameterset Python module. This must be available on your $PYTHONPATH. Check by ensuring that you can replicate the following command:

$ python -c 'import lofar.parameterset ; print "ok"'
ok

The latest version of the framework is available by Subversion from the USG repository. Obtain a snapshot as follows:

$ svn export http://usg.lofar.org/svn/code/trunk/src/pipeline/ ~/pipeline_framework

This will create a pipeline_framwork directory within your current working directory. That directory contains a number of subdirectories. Note first docs: this contains the source for the pipeline documentation. If you have Sphinx installed, you can run make in that directory to generate the documentation tree.

The framework itself is a Python package named lofarpipe. It is found in the framework directory, and may be installed using the setup.py script included. The output directory can be specified using the --prefix option; in the example below, we install to /opt/pipeline/framework.

$ cd ~/pipeline_framework/framework
$ sudo python setup.py install --prefix=/opt/pipeline/framework
running install
running build
running build_py
[... many lines elided ...]
running install_egg_info
Writing /opt/pipeline/framework/lib/python2.6/site-packages/Pipeline-0.1.dev-py2.6.egg-info

After installation, ensure that the relevant site-packages directory appears on your $PYTHONPATH environment variable:

$ export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/opt/pipeline/framework/lib/python2.6/site-packages/

You may wish to add this to your shell startup sequence.

The pipeline also comes with a collection of recipes in the pipeline_framework/recipes directory. These are not required by the framework itself, but will be useful for building pipelines. Ensure the contents of this directory are conveniently accessible:

$ sudo cp -r ~/pipeline_framework/recipes /opt/pipeline

At this point, the basic framework code should be installed. The next step is to start running simple recipes: see the Running basic pipelines section for details.