Installation

This installation guide includes only the GeoCAT-f2py installation and build instructions. Please refer to GeoCAT Contributor’s Guide for installation of the whole GeoCAT project or GeoCAT-comp for that of the overall computational component of the GeoCAT project.

Installing GeoCAT-f2py via Conda

The easiest way to install GeoCAT-f2py is using Conda:

conda create -n geocat -c conda-forge -c ncar geocat-f2py

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

conda activate geocat

If you somewhat need to make use of other software packages, such as Matplotlib, Cartopy, Jupyter, etc. with GeoCAT-f2py, 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 some of these additional commonly used Python packages pre-installed:

conda create -n geocat -c conda-forge -c ncar geocat-f2py matplotlib cartopy 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 matplotlib cartopy jupyter

Please note that the use of the conda-forge channel is essential to guarantee compatibility between dependency packages.

Also, note that the Conda package manager automatically installs all required dependencies of GeoCAT-f2py, meaning it is not necessary to explicitly install Python, NumPy, Xarray, or Dask when creating an environment and installing GeoCAT-f2py. Although packages like Matplotlib are often used with GeoCAT-f2py, they are considered optional dependencies and must be explicitly installed.

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

Building GeoCAT-f2py from source

Building GeoCAT-f2py 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-f2py from source, you will need the following packages to be installed.

Required dependencies for building GeoCAT-f2py

How to create a Conda environment for building GeoCAT-f2py

The GeoCAT-f2py source code includes two Conda environment definition files in the /build_envs folder under the root directory that can be used to create a development environment containing all of the packages required to build GeoCAT-f2py. The file environment_Linux.yml is intended to be used on Linux systems, while environment_Darwin.yml should be used on macOS. It is necessary to have separate environment_*.yml files because Linux and macOS use different compilers, although the following commands should work on both Linux and macOS:

conda env create -f build_envs/environment_$(uname).yml
conda activate geocat_f2py_build

Installing GeoCAT-f2py from source

Once the dependencies listed above are installed, you can install GeoCAT-f2py with running the following command from the root-directory:

./build.sh

which will generate all the required shared object (.so) files as well as automatically run the following code:

pip install .

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

Testing a GeoCAT-f2py build

A GeoCAT-f2py build can be tested from the root directory of the source code repository using the following command (Explicit installation of the pytest package may be required, please see above):

pytest test