Installing SimIM

Requirements

Python 3 is required. The package has been primarily developed on Python 3.11 and tested on 3.6; compatibility with Python versions earlier than 3.6 is not guaranteed.

Most SimIM dependencies are common astronomical/scientific computing or visualization packages. The PyPI installation will automatically include these files.

Some SimIM features rely on the GNU Wget application. Instructions for installing it are available on the GNU Wget webage. It can be installed on MacOS via homebrew. This is only necessary if you intend to use SimIM to download Illustris/TNG data files.

From PyPI

SimIM is available in the Python Package Index (PyPI) and can be installed via pip.

$ pip install simim

Once SimIM is installed an additional step is required to set up paths for data storage. This can by done by running the setupsimim command in the command line:

$ setupsimim
Please specify a path to save data directories.
Specifying no path will set the path to your home directory.
Path: [path to data directory]
Files will be saved in [path to data directory]/simim_resources
Is this okay? y/n: [enter y to continue]

Alternatively, within a Python interpreter this can be accomplished as follows:

>>> from simim import setupsimim
>>> setupsimim()
Please specify a path to save data directories.
Specifying no path will set the path to your home directory.
Path: [path to data directory]
Files will be saved in [path to data directory]/simim_resources
Is this okay? y/n: [enter y to continue]

This script only needs to be run once and the provided path will be used by all subsequent uses of the SimIM package. Should your data directory ever move, you’ll need to re-run the setupsimim function.

From GitHub

The source code for SimIM is available on the SimIM project GitHub and can be directly cloned and installed.

From the command line:

$ cd [location where you want to copy the repo]
$ git clone https://github.com/rpkeenan/simim_public.git
$ pip install .

Once SimIM is installed you will need to setup the path to the data directory. This can be done in the same manner as in the previous section or by running the setupsimim.py script included in the source code distribution.

Warning

When setupsimim is run within the SimIM repo, it may cache the location of the data directory in the repo, rather than the installed version of SimIM (unless the repo itself is the installed version). If you will be executing code using SimIM outside the repo, then you should run setupsimim from a different location.

If you plan to contribute to the SimIM repository, a few additional dependencies exist for building the documentation pages. These are listed in the docs/requirements.txt file.