Source Installation with newinstall.sh

This page will guide you through installing the LSST Science Pipelines from source with newinstall.sh (internally based on eups distrib).

The reference platform for the LSST Science Pipelines is CentOS 7 however individual developers compile on a variety of Linux and macOS operating systems so if you are on a similar platform you should be able to build from source successfully.

We also offer Conda binaries and Docker images if you do not wish to install the Science Pipelines from source.

If you have difficulty installing LSST software:

1. Install prerequisites

2. Choose an installation directory

First, choose where you want to install the LSST Science Pipelines. We’ll use $HOME/lsst_stack in this example. Create and change into that directory:

mkdir -p $HOME/lsst_stack
cd $HOME/lsst_stack

Tip

Permissions for multi-user installations

Those in a system administration role, who are installing a writable stack for multiple users, will likely want to establish a separate group (perhaps lsst) with a umask of 002 (all access permissions for the group; allow other users to read+execute). The installation directory must be owned by the group, have the SGID (2000) bit set, and allow group read/write/execute: that is, mode 2775. Individual users who install a personal Stack on their own machine need not worry about this.

3. Unset environment variables

If you’ve run the LSST Science Pipelines previously, you may have conflicting environment variables setup. To be safe, run:

unset LSST_HOME EUPS_PATH LSST_DEVEL EUPS_PKGROOT REPOSITORY_PATH

4. Installation set-up

Download and run the installation setup script from GitHub, which installs the basic packages required to install other packages:

curl -OL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lsst/lsst/13.0/scripts/newinstall.sh
bash newinstall.sh

This installs the loadLSST.* scripts, which you should source to ensure that LSST tools (e.g., the eups command) are included in your path.

The install script will check your system to ensure that appropriate versions of critical packages are installed on your system, to enable bootstrapping the Science Pipelines, including git, and python. If these packages are not available, the script will offer to install them for you (using the Anaconda Python distribution for the latter packages).

Allowing the installation of these core packages will not replace or modify any other version of these packages that may be installed on your system. If you do not choose the Anaconda Python install, and subsequent package build steps fail, you can do one of two things:

  • Report the problem to community.lsst.org. Include your OS, a description of the problem, plus any error messages. Community members will provide assistance.
  • Consider removing all contents of the install directory and start from scratch, and accepting the Anaconda Python installation option.

Once newinstall.sh has finished, source the LSST environment to continue the installation by running the appropriate command for your shell:

source $LSST_HOME/loadLSST.bash # for bash users
source $LSST_HOME/loadLSST.csh  # for csh users
source $LSST_HOME/loadLSST.ksh  # for ksh users
source $LSST_HOME/loadLSST.zsh  # for zsh users

where $LSST_HOME is expanded to your installation directory.

5. Install lsst_distrib

Finally, install components of the LSST Science Pipelines that are relevant for your work. A simple way to ensure that you have a fairly complete set of packages for this need is to install lsst_distrib:

eups distrib install -t v13_0 lsst_distrib
setup lsst_distrib

After this initial setup, it is a good idea to test the installation. See 7. Testing Your Installation.

6. Source the LSST environment in each shell session

Whenever you want to run the installed LSST Science Pipelines in a new terminal session, be sure to source the appropriate loadLSST.bash, loadLSST.csh, loadLSST.ksh or loadLSST.zsh} script.

Then setup the EUPS packages you need, typically:

setup lsst_distrib

7. Testing Your Installation

Once the LSST Science Pipelines are installed, you can verify that it works by running a demo project. This demo processes a small amount of SDSS data.