Getting started ⚡️

This short guide will walk you through the required steps to set up and install hsr4hci.

Installing the hsr4hci package

The code in this repository is organized as a Python package named hsr4hci together with a set of scripts that use the functions and classes of the package. To get started, you will need to install the package. For this, we strongly recommend you to use a virtual environment.

Attention

The code was written for Python 3.8 and above; earlier versions will likely require some small modifications.

Once you have set up a suitable virtualenv, clone this repository and install hsr4hci as a Python package:

git clone git@github.com:timothygebhard/hsr4hci.git ;
cd hsr4hci ;
pip install .

In case you intend to not only use, but also develop or modify things about the package, it may be useful to install the package in “edit mode” by using the -e flag:

pip install -e .

In this case, you might also want to install the “development requirements”:

pip install -e ".[develop]"

This will install, for example, pytest to run the unit tests.

Setting up the required environmental variables

The workflows of this code base rely on two environmental variables that you need to set to let the code know where the datasets and the experiments folder are located. To this end, please use:

export HSR4HCI_DATASETS_DIR="/path/to/datasets" ;
export HSR4HCI_EXPERIMENTS_DIR="/path/to/experiments" ;

To make these changes more permanent, you can add these lines to your .bashrc, .zshrc, …

Background

The datasets and the experiments folder are contained at the top level of the hsr4hci repository. However, if you do not install the package in edit mode, the code has no way of knowing where you placed these folders when you cloned the repository 🙂 Additionally, you might also want to move them to a different location or disk than the code itself (e.g., due to storage reasons).

There is one more environmental variable that you can set, namely for the location of the scripts directory (see Scripts for more details about this directory):

export HSR4HCI_SCRIPTS_DIR="/path/to/scripts" ;

Strictly speaking, this variable is not needed (i.e., the hsr4hci code never uses it), but the documentation relies on it when specifying which scripts you should run.