Installation instructions

Dependencies

To install MetaWards, you first need to install Python >= 3.7. To check if you have Python 3.7 installed type;

python -V

This should print out the version number of the Python you have available. If the version number is 2.??? then you have a very old Python 2. If this is the case, try;

python3 -V

and see if you have a Python 3 that has a version number >= 3.7. If so, please use python3 instead of python.

If you don’t have Python >=3.7 installed, then you can install Python either via your package manager, or more simply, by using anaconda.

pip install

Once you have a working Python >= 3.7, the easiest way to install MetaWards is using pip.

pip install metawards

(if this doesn’t work, then you may need to use the command pip3, or you may have to install pip. If you have trouble installing pip then we recommend that you download and install anaconda, which has pip included)

To install a specific version, e.g. 0.6.0, type

pip install metawards==0.6.0

This will install a binary version of metawards if it is avaiable for your operating system / processor / version of python. If not, then metawards will be compiled into C using cython, and then compiled into an executable using your system C compiler (e.g. gcc or clang). You can control which C compiler to use by setting the CC environment variable, e.g.

CC=gcc pip install metawards

MetaWards is written in standard C, using OpenMP for parallelisation, and it has no external dependencies, so it should compile without issue. Note that the system C compiler on OS X (Mac) does not support OpenMP. In this case you will need to install and use a different compiler, e.g. installing clang via homebrew. If you have any problems then please post an issue on GitHub.

Source install

You can download a source release of MetaWards from the project release page.

Once you have downloaded the file you can unpack it and change into that directory using;

tar -zxvf MetaWards-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
cd MetaWards-X.Y.Z

where X.Y.Z is the version you downloaded. For the 0.6.0 release this would be;

tar -zxvf MetaWards-0.5.0.tar.gz
cd MetaWards-X.Y.Z

Next you need to install the dependencies of MetaWards. Do this by typing;

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now you are ready to compile and install MetaWards itself;

make
make install

You can choose the C compiler to use by setting the CC environment variable, e.g.

CC=clang make
CC=clang make install

MetaWards is written in standard C, using OpenMP for parallelisation, and it has no external dependencies, so it should compile without issue. Note that the system C compiler on OS X (Mac) does not support OpenMP. In this case you will need to install and use a different compiler, e.g. installing clang via homebrew. If you have any problems then please post an issue on GitHub.

For developers

You can clone the MetaWards repository to your computer and install from there;

git clone https://github.com/metawards/MetaWards
cd MetaWards

From this point you can compile as if you have downloaded from source. As a developer you may want to install the developer tools to enable you to run the tests and create the website. To do this type;

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

pytest tests
cd doc; make html

Note that the tests assume that you have already downloaded the model data from MetaWardsData and configured this as described here.