Installation

Installation#

This installation guide includes only the GeoCAT-comp installation and build instructions.

Please refer to the relevant project documentation for how to install other GeoCAT packages.

Installing GeoCAT-comp via Conda in a New Environment#

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

conda create -n geocat -c conda-forge geocat-comp

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-comp, 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 geocat-comp 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-comp, meaning it is not necessary to explicitly install Python, NumPy, Xarray, or Dask when creating an environment and installing GeoCAT-comp. Although packages like Matplotlib are often used with GeoCAT-comp, 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.

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

If you started a project and later decided to use GeoCAT-comp, 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 foo:
```
conda activate foo
```

Install geocat-comp:

conda install -c conda-forge geocat-comp

Updating GeoCAT-comp via Conda#

It is important to keep your version of geocat-comp 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-comp:
```
conda update geocat-comp
```

Installing GeoCAT-comp via PyPi#

GeoCAT-comp 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-comp from source#

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

Required dependencies for building and testing GeoCAT-comp#

Below are the contents of environment.yml. This file contains all of the dependencies for building and testing GeoCAT-comp.

name: geocat_comp_build
channels:
  - conda-forge
dependencies:
  - python>=3.10,<3.13  # minimum support 3.10
  - cf_xarray>=0.3.1    # min version 0.3.1 for dependencies
  - cftime
  - dask
  - distributed
  - eofs
  - metpy
  - numba
  - numpy<2.0
  - scipy
  - pandas
  - pint
  - xarray
  - xskillscore
# Packages listed below are for testing
  - geocat-datafiles
  - netcdf4
  - parameterized
  - pytest
  - pytest-cov
# The package below is for formatting standards
  - pre-commit

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

The GeoCAT-comp source code includes a conda environment definition file 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-comp. The file 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 build_envs/environment.yml
conda activate geocat_comp_build

Installing GeoCAT-comp#

Once the dependencies listed above are installed, you can install GeoCAT-comp 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.

Testing a GeoCAT-comp build#

A GeoCAT-comp 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