Catharsys Distribution Installation

The installation starts with an image render setup archive. The filename is of the form image-render-setup-[X.Y.Z].zip, where [X.Y.Z] stands for a three digit version number. For this tutorial, we assume that the image render setup archive is located at ~/code/image-render-setup-3.0.28.zip.

Windows

For a Windows install, it is assumed that you are using a PowerShell. This should be the default in all current Windows installations. If you are unfamiliar with PowerShell, here is a list of helpful commands and information.

Step 0

Open a standard PowerShell (Windows) or Bash (Linux) prompt.

Step 1

Unpack the zip-file directly in the code folder.

PowerShell

expand-archive .\image-render-setup-3.0.28.zip -DestinationPath .

Linux

unzip image-render-setup-3.0.28.zip

Step 2

Change to the newly created folder with

Shell

cd image-render-setup-3.0.28

Now activate the base anaconda environment.

PowerShell

If you started the default PowerShell, Anaconda will not be activated, even if it is installed. The image render setup comes with a helpful script that does that for you. Execute:

.\scripts\CondaActivate.ps1

Linux

Under Linux, you have probably already initialized anaconda with the command conda init, which will modify your ~/.bashrc. You can therefore activate conda from any bash prompt with:

conda activate

Step 3

Make sure that the command pip can access the internet. You can test this by trying to upgrade pip (which is a sensible thing to do anyway):

Shell

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

If pip cannot access the module archive, you may need to install and configure a proxy.

Step 4

Run the image render installation. This will create an anaconda environment for you, where everything is installed. We will choose cex1 as the environment name, but you can choose any valid name you like.

Shell

python ./scripts/cathy-conda.py install cex1

This command will create a distribution install, which is sufficient, if you just want to use Catharsys. If you want to develop Catharsys code or Catharsys add-ons, you should do a develop install. In a develop install, the source code of all modules is cloned from a git server, and the code is installed such that you can edit and debug everything, while still using the standard execution commands. If you execute the following command for a develop install, all other commands will recognize this type of install and act accordingly. For example, the VS-Code initialization described later, creates a workspace file that maps all source repositories.

Shell (develop install)

python ./scripts/cathy-conda.py install cex1 --develop

Step 5

To test whether the system installed successfully, you first of all need to switch to the Anaconda environment that was just created:

Shell

conda activate cex1

Now let’s run the main Catharsys management command cathy:

Shell

cathy -h

This should print the usage and available sub-commands of cathy. The set of available commands depends on the Catharsys modules and add-ons installed. If you write your own Catharsys module, you can also define your own sub-commands.

Now try to open the HTML documentation in a web browser, with the command:

Shell

cathy --docs

This should open the default web browser and show this documentation.

Next Steps

Now go back to the main setup document for the next steps.