Installation of polsalt

In order to use polsalt, the pysalt package must be installed. Users have found it difficult to install pySALT due to the different installation recipes based on OS and dependencies. We have therefore created a polSALT docker container, with the pySALT and polSALT software already installed, to simplify the installation process and this is currently the recommended method we advise users to go with; the polSALT docker installation instructions can be found here.

If users prefer to install the polSALT software on their own, we suggest using the Anaconda package system for downloading and installing the basic or beta version, especially if iraf is already installed. This script includes instructions for installing pySALT along with anaconda. A note of caution: we will not be able to offer any assistance should users experience any issues/problem with the pySALT installation.

Basic version

The following steps can be used to install original basic polsalt package for a user: pip install polsalt

Beta version

The current beta version of polsalt can be downloaded from github and installed directory from the repository. On github, we suggest the following steps.

1. Create your own fork of the repository

2. Clone the repository into your own computer. This should be the link from your github fork created from the saltastro repository. For user crawfordsm, this would be the following command:

   git clone https://github.com/crawfordsm/polsalt.git

3. Install the repository on your own laptop

   cd polsalt

   python setup.py develop

   python dirprep.py

4. As a shortcut to pull the latest updates, from this repository, you may want to add the following:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/saltastro/polsalt.git

5. Updates can be pulled by:

   git pull upstream master