In order to build PyTAPS, several external libraries are required:
To run the performance tests or tools, Matplotlib is also required. Finally, to build the documentation (you’re reading it!), Sphinx is required.
Since Python modules are loaded as shared libraries, MOAB’s iMesh library and CGM’s iGeom library should either be configured as shared libraries (--enable-shared) or with position-independent code (--with-pic). This obviously applies to any other iMesh/iGeom implementation, though the configuration options may vary.
Once you have the prerequisites, the easiest way to install PyTAPS is to use Pip (0.7+ recommended):
pip install pytaps
This will download, compile, and install PyTAPS automatically. If you have some but not all of the ITAPS interfaces (e.g. only iMesh), this will only install interfaces for the libraries you have, as described in Autodetection of Libraries.
Like many Python packages, PyTAPS uses Setuptools for installation, so in general setup consists simply of downloading the tarball, extracting it, and typing python setup.py install inside the extracted directory. However, certain ITAPS interfaces may require some additional setup.
The PyTAPS setup script supports importing definitions from the iXxx-Defs.inc files, where iXxx is the name of the interface. PyTAPS will attempt to find these files automatically, by searching in some common locations:
If the PyTAPS setup script cannot find the iXxx-Defs.inc file, it will assume you do not have that interface installed and automatically disable it in PyTAPS.
If you have the iXxx-Defs.inc files installed but not in any of the above locations, you can specify where they are in the global command-line options --iXxx-path=PATH, like so:
python setup.py --iMesh-path=PATH install
For example, if your iMesh-Defs.inc is located at /usr/local/iMesh/lib/iMesh-Defs.inc, then --iMesh-path should be /usr/local/iMesh/. You may also specify this as /usr/local/iMesh/lib or /usr/local/iMesh/lib/iMesh-Defs.inc. Finally, this option may be specified in the setup.cfg file:
[global]
iMesh-path = /path/to/imesh
iGeom-path = /path/to/igeom
iRel-path = /path/to/irel
[build_ext]
include-dirs = /path/to/include
If the iMesh-Defs.inc file was not installed, or you don’t wish to use it, you can manually specify the build options as described below.
In some cases, required objects for building PyTAPS aren’t in the expected directories. One solution to this is to include the appropriate directories in the environment variables CPATH and PYTHONPATH. Another, more flexible method is to use the setup.cfg file. Information on how to use this file can be found in the official Python documentation.
If you only want to build PyTAPS with a subset of the interfaces you have installed (e.g. some of them are built as static libs), you can disable the ones you don’t want with the global options --without-iXxx. For example, if you wanted to disable iMesh, you would run:
python setup.py --without-iMesh install
To run unit/regression tests on the package, you may specify test as an argument to setup.py like so (after installing the package):
python setup.py test
If you only have some of the interfaces installed, this command will only run tests for those interfaces. If you’d like to run a specific subset of tests (or force all tests to be run), you can specify a test suite (or comma-separated list of suites) to run:
python setup.py test --test-suites=test.imesh
To run performance tests on the package comparing the speed of a pure-C usage of ITAPS with PyTAPS, you may pass perf as a command to setup.py. The performance test requires an input file to test. You may also specify the number of times to repeat the tests:
python setup.py perf --file=/path/to/file --count=N
The performance tests consist of two sub-commands, described below.
This command builds the C portion of the performance tests. The following options are allowed:
| --include-dirs=PATHS | -I | list of directories to search for include files |
| --library-dirs=PATHS | -L | list of directories to search for library files |
| --libraries=LIBS | -l | list of libraries to link to |
This command executes the performance tests. The following options are allowed (as with perf):
| --file=PATH | -F | file or directory containing test file(s) |
| --count=N | -c | number of times to repeat each test |
The documentation that you’re currently reading can be built from setup.py by specifying doc as an argument. This command supports the following options:
| --builder=BUILDER | -b | documentation builder (default: html) |
| --target=TARGET | -t | target directory for output |