Installation without root access

Probably, these instructions are restricted to Linux and/or Mac users.

If you don’t have root access to your computer but you still want to install additional packages, you can do so by using a virtual environment. You need to have a basic Python installation for this, and some (but remarkably few) packages need additional non-python packages. Unfortunately, matplotlib is one of these.

Everything below is based on this blog.

1. Download the latest version version of virtualenv.py

to some location (it really doesn’t matter where).

2. Create a base Python environment, e.g. in the directory ~/venv/base (but you can use another too):

   $:> python virtualenv.py ~/venv/base

   This command will create a virtual environment that has access to all the installed packages on your system but allows you to install other packages. If you want a totally clean Python environment, you can do so by replacing the previous command with:

   $:> python virtualenv.py --no-site-packages ~/venv/base

3. Make sure your system finds the new Python executable, by either typing the following line

each time you want to use Phoebe, or add it to your ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile:

$:> source ~/venv/base/bin/activate

4. You now have access to pip, so you can install the required dependencies.

If they are already installed, but you want a newer version, add the option --upgrade after install. This will not touch your system installation, but will install a new version in your virtual environment:

$:> pip install numpy
$:> pip install scipy
$:> pip install ipython