Quickstart

This page takes you from nothing to your first simulation in a few minutes, using the Conda installation. Each step is explained in more detail on that page.

What you need: a Linux or macOS computer (on Windows, use WSL) with Conda (4.8 or more recent) and uv (0.6.7 or more recent) installed.

1. Install PlatoSim in a new Conda environment called platosim:

conda create -n platosim python=3.12
conda activate platosim
conda config --env --add channels conda-forge
conda install -c https://plato:miSotalP@jenkins.miricle.org/platosim/ platosim

2. Install the Python packages. This also creates a working directory, $HOME/platosim_workdir, for your own files:

mkdir -p $HOME/platosim_workdir
cd $HOME/platosim_workdir
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/IvS-KULeuven/PlatoSim3/master/pyproject.toml
uv pip install -r pyproject.toml

3. Set the environment variables. They are stored in the Conda environment, so you only do this once:

conda env config vars set PLATO_PROJECT_HOME=$CONDA_PREFIX PLATO_WORKDIR=$HOME/platosim_workdir PYTHONPATH=$CONDA_PREFIX/python
conda deactivate
conda activate platosim

4. Run a test simulation from the command line. This simulates 10 exposures of a small part of a CCD with the default configuration:

cd $PLATO_WORKDIR
platosim $PLATO_PROJECT_HOME/inputfiles/inputfile.yaml test.hdf5

This creates test.hdf5 (the simulated images) and log.txt (the log messages). Or run the same simulation from Python:

import os
from platosim.simulation import Simulation

sim = Simulation("test_python", outputDir=os.getenv("PLATO_WORKDIR"))
simfile = sim.run()
image = simfile.getImage(0)    # the first simulated image, as a 2D array

Next steps