Installation#

This installation guide includes only the GeoCAT-viz installation and build instructions. Please refer to GeoCAT Contributor’s Guide for installation of the whole GeoCAT project.

Installing GeoCAT-viz via Conda in a New Environment#

The easiest way to install GeoCAT-viz is using Conda:

conda create -n geocat -c conda-forge geocat-viz

where geocat is the name of a new conda environment, which can then be activated using:

conda activate geocat

If you need to make use of other software packages, such as Jupyter with GeoCAT-viz, you may wish to install into your geocat environment. The following conda create command can be used to create a new conda environment that includes one of these additional commonly used Python packages pre-installed:

conda create -n geocat -c conda-forge geocat-viz jupyter

Alternatively, if you already created a conda environment using the first command (without the extra packages), you can activate and install the packages in an existing environment with the following commands:

conda activate geocat # or whatever your environment is called
conda install -c conda-forge jupyter

Also, note that the Conda package manager automatically installs all required dependencies, meaning it is not necessary to explicitly install NumPy, Matplotlib, Cartopy, Xarray, Scikit-learn, etc. when creating an environment.

If you are interested in learning more about how Conda environments work, please visit the managing environments page of the Conda documentation.

Installing GeoCAT-viz in a Pre-existing Conda Environment#

If you started a project and later decided to use GeoCAT-viz, you will need to install it in your pre-existing environment.

Make sure your conda is up to date by running this command from the terminal:
```
conda update conda
```
Activate the conda environment you want to add GeoCAT to. In this example, the environment is called geocat:
```
conda activate geocat
```

Install geocat-viz:

conda install -c ncar -c conda-forge geocat-viz

Updating GeoCAT-viz via Conda#

It is important to keep your version of geocat-viz up to date. This can be done as follows:

Make sure your Conda is up to date by running this command from the terminal:
```
conda update conda
```
Activate the conda environment you want to update. In this example, the environment is called geocat:
```
conda activate geocat
```
Update geocat-viz:
```
conda update geocat-viz
```

Installing GeoCAT-viz via PyPi#

GeoCAT-viz is distributed also in PyPI; therefore, the above Conda installation instructions should, in theory, apply to PyPI installation through using pip install commands instead of conda install wherever they occur.

Building GeoCAT-viz from source#

Building GeoCAT-viz from source code is a fairly straightforward task, but doing so should not be necessary for most users. If you are interested in building GeoCAT-viz from source, you will need the following packages to be installed.

Required dependencies for building and testing GeoCAT-viz#

Python 3.8+

numpy

xarray

matplotlib

cartopy

How to create a Conda environment for building GeoCAT-viz#

The GeoCAT-viz source code includes a conda environment definition file in the root directory that can be used to create a development environment containing all of the packages required to build GeoCAT-viz. The file build_envs/environment.yml is intended to be used on Linux systems and macOS. The following commands should work on both Linux and macOS:

conda env create -f conda_environment.yml
conda activate geocat_viz_build

Installing GeoCAT-viz#

Once the dependencies listed above are installed, you can install GeoCAT-viz with running the following command from the root-directory:

pip install .

For compatibility purposes, we strongly recommend using Conda to configure your build environment as described above.

Installation

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