add installation instructions

[jendrikseipp]

It would be great if the README had some brief installation instructions. Is it possible to use pipx install planutils? In which ways is the bash environment altered?

[haz]

.bashrc is modified to augment the PATH and PLANUTILS_PREFIX paths:

planutils/planutils/__init__.py

Line 30 in 772ce54

print("Adding bin folder to path (assuming ~/.bashrc exists)...")

Not sure if it works w/ pipx, but I would assume not :P

[roveri-marco]

Related to this, I think it would be important to check and document the need of singularity being previously installed in the host machine. Here some notes I've collected for my course:

• Be sure to use Python version ≥ 3.6.*
  • To install pip or pip3 (in Debian like Linux distributions e.g. Ubuntu):
    Run apt-get install python-pip or apt-get install python3-pip
• Be sure singularity framework is installed in the host machine, If not, have a look at this URL:
  • https://sylabs.io/guides/3.8/user-guide/quick_start.html#quick-installation-steps
  • Before running singularity, a reboot may be needed!
  • Under Linux singularity do not mount all the host files by default. Edit file /usr/local/etc/singularity/singularity.conf (or /etc/singularity/singularity.conf) changing mount hostfs = no to mount hostfs = yes.
• To update planutils run pip3 install --upgrade planutils and then planutils upgrade to download latest versions of the singularity images!

[tomitrescak]

I am lost how to install this ;( I installed it with pip3, but I am getting "permission denied".

[roveri-marco]

I am lost how to install this ;( I installed it with pip3, but I am getting "permission denied".

Permission denied for which command? Singularity or for planutils? Can you be more precise and post here the error you're getting?

[haz]

Might be that you don't have permission to install pip packages as a user, so sudo pip3 install planutils would be the path. But either way, having singularity installed/configured is a must.

A far easier path (for now) is to just use the docker version: https://hub.docker.com/r/aiplanning/planutils

[jendrikseipp]

Maybe this is useful for others: to install Singularity on Ubuntu 20.04, one can use the Debian package for Singularity:

wget http://ftp.se.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/singularity-container/singularity-container_3.5.2+ds1-1_amd64.deb -O singularity.deb
sudo dpkg -i singularity.deb 

[haz]

Nice! This the latest version of singularity that we need to run the images?

[jendrikseipp]

I had no trouble running planners with Singularity 3.5. Thanks to Álvaro and Florian, all IPC 2018 planners run under SIngularity 3.5 (https://ipc2018-classical.bitbucket.io/).

[tomitrescak]

Just update on my situation, the problem was missing Singularity install, the planner now run well.

[roveri-marco]

I'm able to run all also with 3.8.0-rc.1+134-g946c9fd5f

[haz]

This is brilliant news! Means it's finally time to dust off and promote the thing (was waiting for Singularity version to not pose an issue).

Will address this issue and others in the coming weeks as my course-load drops. Stay tuned!

[guicho271828]

The correct answer to the adding PATH to .bashrc... is to set up entrypoints and make pip handle binaries by itself.
https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide/entry_point.html

[haz]

We already do that for planutils: https://github.com/AI-Planning/planutils/blob/master/setup.py#L20

[haz]

Thing is that we'd like to be dynamically installing things as you use the library, which is why it's all placed in a local ~/.planutils folder. You can see the wrangling happening here: https://github.com/AI-Planning/planutils/blob/master/planutils/__init__.py#L19

[guicho271828]

I see.

In my opinion, we will have a better user experience if all scripts (e.g., lama, ff, etc) are already set up as entrypoints and each script installs binaries on demand and call the planner. aka idempotency.

Occasionally you may want to update a binary, but the user never has to explicitly install a binary.

[guicho271828]

In other words, I believe we should utilize an already available python tooling as much as possible. I don't think it is correct to maintain the scripts ourselves. In a sense it is reinventing wheels that pip already handles.

[guicho271828]

I see now that planutils setup creates bunch of shell scripts in .planutils, and see all scripts are already instantiated there.
I am pretty sure that this mechanism can be replaced with an entrypoint mechanism.

[haz]

I think we're leaning away from that. It's very destructive to your cmd-line to have everything added all at once -- especially as the breadth of planutils grows. We don't want to reject certain additions just because there are "too many executables already".

It's moving to a model where planutils is the only binary installed by default, and you can do planutils run <planner> ... out of the box. Then an optional mode to place those bits of software on the path, if that's what you want. So planutils setup bash-path or whatever would do the behaviour you see now.

This brings it in line with pipx and the like.

But to your point...

In a sense it is reinventing wheels that pip already handles.

...this is very much the case. But solving it proper means moving to a configuration on top of anaconda or similar (to handle all the dependencies in a far better way, etc). Cf. #35