Prerequisites¶
This page lists software needed to install and use the LSST Science Pipelines.
Platform compatibility¶
The LSST Data Management reference platform is CentOS 7. This is the platform we officially develop, test, and operate with.
Besides the reference platform, our developers and automatic tests regularly compile and run the Pipelines under CentOS 8, a variety of other Linux distributions, and various versions of macOS. See LSST Stack Testing Status reports of building LSST software on various platforms.
System prerequisites¶
The Science Pipelines are developed and built using a standard Conda environment. This provides (almost; see below) all necessary tools and libraries for building and running the Pipelines. On installation, you will be given the option of automatically installing that environment. If you decline, your system must have all of the prerequisites listed below available:
In addition to the Conda environment, the following packages must be installed on the host system.
CentOS¶
On CentOS 8, patch and diffutils are required. On CentOS 7, diffutils is included with the operating system; only patch must be installed. They may be installed as follows:
sudo yum install patch diffutils
If you wish to follow the instructions for Installation with lsstsw and lsst-build (recommended for some developers, but not necessary for most users), you will also need to install git:
sudo yum install git
Debian/Ubuntu¶
On Debian and Ubuntu systems, curl and patch are required. These may be installed as follows:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install curl patch
If you wish to follow the instructions for Installation with lsstsw and lsst-build (recommended for some developers, but not necessary for most users), you will also need to install git:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install git
macOS¶
On macOS systems, please install the Xcode Command Line Tools:
xcode-select --install
The scipipe_conda_env environment used for the Science Pipelines through Release 21.0.0 requires the software development kit (SDK) from Xcode 11.x (11.7 recommended); it is not compatible with the Xcode 12 SDK.
Filesystem prerequisites¶
Filesystems used for compiling the Stack and hosting output data repositories must support the flock system call for file locking.
Local filesystems virtually always have this support.
Network filesystems are sometimes mounted without such support to improve performance; the output of the mount command may show the nolock or noflock option in those cases.
Optional dependencies¶
Some pipeline components use SAOImage DS9, if available, for image display purposes.