radiopadre-client 1.2.0

Description:

radiopadreclient 1.2.0

Your one-stop client-side script to run radiopadre notebooks
locally and on remote machines.
Quick start:
$ pip install radiopadre-client
$ run-radiopadre interesting_local_directory --auto-init
Or for a remote session, assuming you have ssh access to the host:
$ run-radiopadre remote_host:interesting_remote_directory --auto-init
(With any luck, the –auto-init option will cause an automatic installation on the remote end.)

Overview
Radiopadre is a Jupyter
notebook framework for quick and easy visualization of [radio astronomy, primarily]
data products and pipelines.
Radiopadre includes integration with JS9 and CARTA
for live FITS viewing of [remote] FITS files straight from your browser.
(In boldface, because this is a pretty neat capability to have!)
Radiopadre is a custom Jupyter kernel, so in principle you could install it
and create radiopadre notebooks directly from a Jupyter session. Some of the
tight integration with JS9 and CARTA, however, works smoother if you start your sessions
via run-radiopadre, which takes care of starting up and stopping appropriate
helper processes and such.
run-radiopadre can also take care of
starting radiopadre inside remote Jupyter
sessions using virtualenv, Docker or Singularity.
It will manage port forwarding for you, so that your local browser can talk to the remote Jupyter server (and CARTA/JS9 backends).


Installation notes
Radiopadre strives to be admin-free. That is, you should not need to bother
your friendly local sysadmin for most (or all) of the below.
Radiopadre itself (plus the attendant Jupyter etc. dependencies) must
be installed inside a Python 3.6+ virtual environment. The Jupyter
notebook server then runs inside this environment.
run-radiopadre does not have (but can) live in the same virtualenv. Since
it has almost no dependencies (and is backwards-compatible down to
Python 2.7), you can install it directly with pip install --user,
for example. (Or clone the repository and jury-rig an install via PATH
and PYTHONPATH settings.)

Automatic virtualenv install
If started outside a virtualenv, run-radiopadre -V will look for a virtualenv
called ~/.radiopadre/venv, activate it, and run the Jupyter
notebook server within.
If ~/.radiopadre/venv does not exist, specify the --auto-init
option so that run-radiopadre can try to create it for you, and install
radiopadre inside. This is normally the easiest way to bootstrap a new
installation. (Python 3.6+ required.)


Manual virtualenv install
If, for whatever reason, you want to install radiopadre in a custom
virtualenv, then create [a Python 3.6+] one yourself and install radiopadre inside it
following the instructions.
This follows normal pip practice. You can use pip install, or else
pip install -e for an “editable” install from a local directory. Since radiopadre depends on
radiopadre-client, it will automatically install the latter as well
(though you may well want to pre-install a local version with pip install -e).
If run-radiopadre is then run inside that virtual environment, it will
look for radiopadre in the same environment. Alternatively, you can still
run run-radiopadre -V outside the environment, but specify its location
with --radiopadre-venv.


The Docker/Singularity backends
If you don’t want to or can’t use virtual environments (don’t have Python 3.6,
for example), you can run radiopadre notebooks inside a Docker or Singularity
container. Images are provided on dockerhub.
To use containers, invoke run-singularity -D or run-singularity -S.
This will automatically download the required image from dockerhub, if not
already available on the system.


Remote installation
To run remote radiopadre sessions, the remote end must have either:
(a) have a full radiopadre install inside .radiopadre/venv (or
another custom environment);
(b) have radiopadre-client alone installed inside .radiopadre/venv,
and support Docker or Singularity;
(c) or have run-radiopadre somewhere in the default path (i.e. a
pip install -e, or a jury-rigged install), and support Docker
or Singularity.
Case (a) requires Python 3.6+, and allows run-radiopadre -V, while (b) or
(c) can make do with Python as low as 2.7, but require using
run-radiopadre -D or run-radiopadre -S.
If you’ve got nothing at all installed on the remote, you can try --auto-init
to bootstrap an installation. At present, this will try to set up case (a), so
Python 3.6+ and virtualenv is required. For funky/older systems without,
you’ll have to set up (b) or (c) by hand.



Examples
$ run-radiopadre -V .
Uses the virtualenv backend (-V). Activates the virtual environment,
runs the Jupyter notebook server inside with “.” as the working directory,
and drives a browser to it (see --browser option).
If no notebooks are present, creates a minimalistic starter notebook
called radiopadre-default.ipynb. If a notebook called
radiopadre-auto.ipynb is present, opens it automatically (see
--auto-load option.) Also opens the CARTA browser in a separate tab.
$ run-radiopadre -V remote_box:project
Uses SSH to connect to remote_box. Uses the virtualenv backend
(-V). Activates the virtual environment, runs the Jupyter notebook
server inside with ~/project as the working directory. Sets up port
forwarding so that a local browser can talk to Jupyter on the remote end.
Drives a local browser to the appropriate URL. If no notebooks are
present in project, creates a minimalistic starter notebook
called radiopadre-default.ipynb. Opens radiopadre-auto.ipynb
automatically.
$ run-radiopadre -D remote_box:project --auto-init -u
Uses SSH to connect to remote_box. If run-radiopadre is not
found on the remote, tries to bootstrap an installation.
If successful, uses the Docker backend (-D). Checks for an updated
version of the Docker image (-u) and downloads it if needed.
Runs the container with a Jupyter notebook
server inside, with ~/project as the working directory. Sets up port
forwarding so that a local browser can talk to Jupyter inside
the remote container. Drives a local browser to the appropriate URL. If no notebooks are
present in project, creates a minimalistic starter notebook
called radiopadre-default.ipynb. Opens radiopadre-auto.ipynb
automatically.


Persistent configuration
Combinations of command-line settings can be made into
persistent defaults by saving them to a config file called
~/.config/radiopadre-client. This is useful when you
work with different remote hosts with different setups. The
-s option saves the current combination of command-line
options to a config section called [host]. The -e option
saves them to a section called [host:path]. For
example, the result of the following
three runs of run-radiopadre:
$ run-radiopadre -D box1:project1 -s
$ run-radiopadre -V box1:project2 -e
$ run-radiopadre -S box2:project2 -s
is the following config file:
[box1]
backend = docker

[box1:project1]
backend = venv

[box2:project2]
backend = singularity
The contents of the config file modify the relevant default
settings. If run-radiopadre is then run without an explicit
-V, -D, or -S option for a matching host (and possibly path),
the default backend setting is taken from the config file.
In case of confusion, look at messages at the start of
run-radiopadre. These tell you which settings come from
the config file, and which from the command line.
Note also that some options (e.g. --update and
--auto-init) are considered one-off settings, and are
not saved to the config file.


Recent sessions
Invoking run-radiopadre without arguments gives you a list
of the five most recent sessions, and lets you invoke one
of them again by entering its number.


Updates and bleeding-edge installs
The --client-install-pip and --server-install-pip determine
what package names are passed to pip install when
--auto-init is invoked. The default values are simply
radiopadre-client and radiopadre. Whenever --update
is given, pip --upgrade is invoked to upgrade
these packages. You can pin a particular release by including
a pip version specifier, e.g. --radiopadre-client radiopadre-client==1.0.
~Maso~ advanced users may want to track the git repository versions
rather than pip releases. This can be done by setting
the following options, adjusting their values as appropriate:
--client-install-path ~/radiopadre-client
--client-install-repo https://github.com/ratt-ru/radiopadre-client.git
--client-install-branch master
--server-install-path ~/radiopadre
--server-install-repo https://github.com/ratt-ru/radiopadre.git
--server-install-branch master
These options override the pip settings. Rather than installing from
PyPI, the packages are then cloned from the specified repositories
into the specified directories, and installed into the virtual environment
with pip install -e. When --update is given, git pull
is invoked to update the sources.
If using Docker or Singularity, you will probably want to combine this
with the --container-dev option. If set, this will mount the
client/server install paths inside the container, thus overriding
the potentially older versions installed inside the image.