Installing python-tidegates¶
python-tidegates is an ArcGIS python toolbox and library for analyzing the extent of flooding and damage to assets under varying sea level rise and storm surge scenarios.
Terminology¶
- ArcGIS
- The suite of proprietarty GIS applications licensed by Esri. Includes ArcMap and ArcCatalog.
- ArcGIS session
- Use of either ArcMap or ArcCatalog.
- command prompt or terminal
- The Windows interface to its command-line tools.
- python
- An open source, dynamic programming language that Esri bundles with ArcGIS. The current version (as of 2015-11-11) is Python 3.5. However ArcGIS 10 installations use Python 2.7, released 2010-07-03.
- numpy
- An open source numerical extension to python that provides the basis for must scientific/numeric libraries in python.
- arcpy
- A proprietary Python-based interface to some of the geoprocessing and cartographic functionality of ArcGIS.
- nose
- An open source unit test runner for python.
- mock
- An open source unit testing library that allows you to replace complex parts of a system and inspect how they are used.
- fiona
- An open source python library for reading and writing shapefiles.
- jupyter
- An open source, programming language-agnostic suite tools aimed at facilitating reproducible scientific work. The name stands for “Julia”, “Python”, and “R”, the names of three scientific computing languages.
- git
- A distributed version control software. See https://git-scm.com/ for more details.
- API
- “Application programming interface”. This is essentially the public, developer-facing functions an classes of one library that a developer can used to create yet another library.
Downloading python-tidegates¶
An always current zipped archive of the tool can be downloaded at https://github.com/Geosyntec/python-tidegates/archive/master.zip.
Alternatively, you can simply clone this repository through git:
git clone https://github.com/Geosyntec/python-tidegates.git
Dependencies¶
Runtime¶
- This library requires the following python-packages to be installed on your system:
- python 2.7
- arcpy
- numpy
Testing¶
- To run the full suite of tests packages with this system, you additionally need:
- nose
- mock
- fiona (optional)
Both nose and mock can be installed via pip (e.g., pip install mock), however fiona can be quite tricky to install on some systems. For that reason fiona is an optional dependency. Tests requiring it are skipped if it is not found while the tests are running. The nose and mock modules are absolutely required, however.
Installing python-tidegates¶
This is a pure-python library, so installation from source (even on Windows) is not an issue. After acquiring and unzipping the source-code in some fashion, open a terminal, navigate into the directory, and execute
pip install .
(The . tells the command that the package is in the current directory)
Inside a fresh, new terminal, that looks like this:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600]
(c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Users\phobson> cd C:\Users\phobson\Downloads\python-tidegates-master
C:\Users\phobson\Downloads\python-tidegates-master> pip install .
Processing c:\users\phobson\downloads\python-tidegates-master
Building wheels for collected packages: tidegates
Running setup.py bdist_wheel for tidegates
Stored in directory: C:\Users\phobson\AppData\Local\pip\Cache\wheels\bc\1d\a3\fae5dffd5c5863...
Successfully built tidegates
Installing collected packages: tidegates
Successfully installed tidegates-0.1
At that point, python-tidegates as been installed.
Running the test suite¶
The code base that powers the GIS toolboxes uses a code QC technique known as unit testing. In this case, we rely on the python package nose to find, collect, and execute all of the tests.
With all of the required testing dependencies installed, navigate to the source directory and execute the nosetests command.
That entire process looks something like this.
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600]
(c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Users\phobson> cd C:\Users\phobson\Downloads\python-tidegates-master
C:\Users\phobson\Downloads\python-tidegates-master> nosetests
........................................
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 40 tests in 5.634s
Depending on your system, more tests may be executed, and some might by skipped.