Download and Install

PyTurbSim is built primarily in Python, makes heavy use of the NumPy Python package, and has a small set of Fortran libraries. Therefore, prior to installing PyTurbSim you will first need to install,

  1. A functioning Python 2.7 installation (with pip),
  2. A Fortran compiler,
  3. Numpy >=1.6.

If you have not already installed these tools, doing so may be the difficult part of installing PyTurbSim. Most Linux/Unix/posix distributions provide binary packages that make it relatively easy to installing these tools. For Microsoft windows I recommend installing a Python package that includes all three of these tools (e.g. Python(X,Y)) because they will hopefully be configured to function together seamlessly. On OSX (Mavericks) I have successfully installed these tools using Homebrew.

Once these tools have been successfully installed, PyTurbSim can be installed from a command line using pip:

$ pip install PyTurbSim

That should do it. For information on how to use PyTurbSim consult the Usage page.

Installing without pip

If the above-mentioned one-liner does not work (e.g. because your version of Python does not include pip), you can also simply download and install PyTurbSim from the source repository (http://github.com/lkilcher/pyTurbSim). For example, if git is installed, you can:

$ git clone http://github.com/lkilcher/pyTurbSim <download_location>

If <download_location> is not specified, the repository will be created in the current directory in a new pyTurbSim folder. Once you have downloaded PyTurbSim, you may either:

  1. install it into your Python packages repository by executing the setup.py script:

    $ cd <download_location>
$ python setup.py install

  2. use it out of <download_location>.

Windows Installation Issues

I have encountered various issues related to compiling the Fortran source code when installing on Windows. If you recieve the dreaded unable to find vcvarsall.bat message, there are widely recommended solutions summarized as answers to this Stack Overflow Question, but I’ve only gotten the one that involves creating/editing the ‘distutils.cfg’ file to work for me. Note that I used pip to install this tool, rather than using easy_install, as suggested in that post.

The other solution, which implicitly assumes you have MS Visual Studio installed, has led to other errors for me:

gfortran.lib(backtrace.o) : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol __Unwind_GetIpInfo referenced in function _trace_function`

gfortran.lib(backtrace.o) : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol __Unwind_Backtrace referenced in function __gfortran_backtrace

I think this is a result of the compile steps being completed by gfortran, and the linking step is being done by MSVS’ link.exe.

If you encounter other issues installing this tool on Windows, feel free to create an issue.