Getting started: installing the Science Pipelines software

This page will guide you through installing and activating the LSST Science Pipelines software using the method we recommend for most users.

Installing the LSST Science Pipelines with newinstall.sh

There are several ways to install the LSST Science Pipelines, depending on your needs. For getting started, we recommend the newinstall method for installing the LSST Science Pipelines. Follow the directions on that page to install system prerequisites, run the newinstall.sh script, and ultimately the install lsst_distrib package that contains the LSST Science Pipelines software.

Installing Git LFS for LSST

The tutorial requires Git LFS to download the sample datasets. To install and configure Git LFS for LSST, follow the directions on the Configuring Git LFS for downloading LSST data packages page.

Activating your Pipelines installation

Before using you can use your Pipelines installation, you’ll first need to activate the environment and set up the Pipelines packages.

First, open a new command line shell. Since the Pipelines adds environment variables to your shell, working in a new shell will make it easier to follow along.

Next, at your shell prompt activate your installation’s environment. The activation command you’ll use depends on your installation method. If you installed with newinstall.sh, the activation command is:

source <install-dir>/loadLSST.bash

Note

If you aren’t using the bash shell, use a different loading script:

• zsh shell: loadLSST.zsh
• ksh shell: loadLSST.ksh
• csh and tcsh shells: loadLSST.csh

The loadLSST.bash script has only activated the software environment. We still need to set up the LSST software; we’ll do that next.

Setting up the lsst_distrib EUPS package

LSST Science Pipelines are distributed as EUPS packages. To use any of the packages, you’ll first need to set them up using EUPS’s setup command.

lsst_distrib is a useful package to set up because it’s a top-level package that depends on most packages LSST ships. To set up lsst_distrib, run:

setup lsst_distrib

Tip

You can see what packages have been set up by running:

eups list -s

With the -s argument eups list shows only set up packages; otherwise eups list shows all packages that you installed, regardless of whether they’re set up or not.

Next up

Now that you have the LSST Science Pipelines installed and activated, let’s learn how to process a dataset.

The getting started tutorial series will guide you through calibrating and processing a collection of Hyper Suprime-Cam images to make coadditions and measure source catalogs. Begin the tutorial at Getting started tutorial part 1: setting up the Butler data repository.