Installation

visualCaseGen presently works with the cesm3_0_alpha09d version of CESM. The following instructions guide you through obtaining this CESM version and installing visualCaseGen within it.

Prerequisite

  • A UNIX style operating system (Linux, macOS, etc.)

  • Python

  • Conda

  • Git

Warning

  • If you are running visualCaseGen on a machine other than a standard CESM machine (e.g., derecho, casper), you will need to port CESM to your machine. For guidance on porting CESM, refer to the CESM documentation, or consult support through the CESM forum. If you choose not to port CESM to your machine, you can still run visualCaseGen, but the final step of “case creation” will be disabled. Instead, you will have the option to print the necessary steps to manually create the configured case on a supported machine. If you are using a supported machine, you can run visualCaseGen as normal, and the final step of “case creation” will be enabled.

Download CESM and visualCaseGen

To download CESM, clone the CESM GitHub repository at the supported release tag and use the git-fleximod script that comes with CESM as a package manager, as follows. Note that downloading CESM may take some time.

git clone https://github.com/ESCOMP/CESM.git -b cesm3_0_alpha09d cesm3_0_alpha09d
cd cesm3_0_alpha09d
./bin/git-fleximod update

Then, clone visualCaseGen (with its submodules) inside the CESM directory:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ESMCI/visualCaseGen.git

Create the visualCaseGen conda environment

To create the visualCaseGen conda environment, navigate to the visualCaseGen directory and run the following commands:

cd visualCaseGen
conda env create -f environment.yml

This will create the visualCaseGen conda environment. Activate the visualCaseGen conda environment by running the following command:

conda activate visualCaseGen

Verify Installation

To verify that visualCaseGen was installed correctly, run the test suite:

pytest tests/

If the test suite completes successfully, visualCaseGen is ready for use. If any tests fail, please open an issue on the visualCaseGen GitHub repository, including error messages and the installation steps you followed.