Tutorials

All of the following explanations expect that you use a linux command line. Whenever some names are subject to your choice, they are marked as [CHOICE]. If you encounter trouble, consider the remarks at the end of the page.

While some of the routines displayed here can be helpful 'for private use', you usually employ parallel bilby on a computer cluster. This should usually have python and miniconda available. You might need to activate these, though, typing:

module load python

If miniconda is not yet installed, you can get it the usual way. Further make sure it is updated to the most recent version by typing

conda update -n base -c defaults conda

It will save you a great amount of pain to use a dedicated python environment for your work with bilby. Create it with

conda create -n [YOUR_PBILBY_ENVIRONMENT] python=3.7

and hit y when asked if you want to proceed. Then activate it by typing

conda activate [YOUR_PBILBY_ENVIRONMENT]

Python packages are distributed through sometimes conflicting channels. To avoid conflicts, we make sure to use the very common channel conda-forge:

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --set channel_priority strict

Then execute the following commands to install packages that the bilby-family requires:

conda install mpi4py
conda install ipython
conda install numpy
conda install scipy
conda install matplotlib

Whenever asked for confirmation to proceed, hit y.

If you want to work with the bilby family in its most recent version, simply use again

conda install bilby
conda install bilby_pipe
conda install parallel_bilby

If however, you want to include the possibility to sample over Equations of State, you need to install from source as this allows us to include dedicated patches (see below). To do so, (make and) go to a convenient destination directory (cd [YOUR_DESTINATION]) and download the respective package:

git clone https://git.ligo.org/lscsoft/bilby.git
git clone https://git.ligo.org/lscsoft/bilby_pipe.git
git clone https://git.ligo.org/lscsoft/parallel_bilby.git

This should create a folder each in your destination that contains the package's components. The EoS patches require older versions of each package. Therefore execute the following lines:

cd bilby
pip install -r requirements.txt
git checkout -b branch_1.1.4 1.1.4
pip install .

cd ../bilby_pipe
git checkout -b branch_1.0.4 1.0.4
pip install .

cd ../parallel_bilby
git checkout -b branch_1.0.1 1.0.1
pip install .

Patches to handle EoS are available in this zip-file. Copy it to your desired system, using e.g. the scp-command.

It can happen that for some of the bilby-packages, pip install . raises an error, similar to this:

  ERROR: Failed building wheel for lscsoft-glue
Successfully built bilby-pipe
Failed to build ligo-segments python-ligo-lw lscsoft-glue

Note that it still claims bilby-pipe to be successfully built. This seems to be especially frequent when using Virtual Machines or Ubuntu for Windows. A possible solution is this:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc

Then try again pip install .. You may also need to update pip by running pip install -U pip (with a capital U).