Installation Guide

This document explains how to install Imprint.

Installing the Package

PyPI

Imprint is available via pypi, so the recommended way to install it is

pip install imprint[all]

The extra [all] installs most of the Dependencies necessary to generate simple images and tables. It can be omitted for a bare-bones install.

Source

Imprint uses setuptools, so you can install it from source as well. If you have a copy of the source distribution, run

python setup.py install

from the project root directory, with the appropriate privileges. A source distribution can be found on PyPI as well as directly on GitHub.

You can do the same thing with pip if you prefer. Any of the following should work, depending on how you obtained your distribution

pip install git+<URL>/imprint.git@master[all]  # For a remote git repository
pip install imprint.zip[all]                   # For an archived file
pip install imprint[all]                       # For an unpacked folder or repo

See the page about Dependencies for a complete description of additional software that may need to be installed. Using setup.py or pip should take care of all the Python dependencies.

Demos

Imprint is packaged with a set of demo projects intended primarily for the Tutorials. The demos are not normally installed as part of Imprint, Instead, they are to be accessed through the source repository or the documentation Documentation, once that is built. See Demos for a complete list.

Tests

Imprint does not currently have any formal unit tests available. However, running through all of the demos serves as a non-automated set of tests, since they exercise nearly every part of Imprint. Eventually, pytest-compatible tests will be added in the tests package.

Documentation

If you intend to build the documentation, you must have Sphinx installed, and optionally the ReadTheDocs Theme extension for optimal viewing. See the dependencies spec for more details.

The documentation can be built from the complete source distribution by using the specially defined command:

python setup.py build_sphinx

Alternatively (perhaps preferably), it can be built using the provided Makefile:

cd doc
make html

Both options work on Windows and Unix-like systems that have make installed. The Windows version does not require make. On Linux you can also do

make -C doc html

Building the documentation will also make a copy of the Demos.

The documentation is not present in the PyPI source distributions, only directly from GitHub.