Installation

pyRTX requires a Conda environment to manage its dependencies, particularly the C++ ray tracing library, Embree.

Step 1: Install Dependencies with Conda

Set up a Conda environment and install the required dependencies from the conda-forge channel. This step is needed to ensure that the most complex dependencies are properly managed.

conda create --name pyRTX-env -c conda-forge python=3.8  embree3 python-embree basemap
conda activate pyRTX-env

NOTE: The above steps are compatible with a Linux installation. If you are using a macOS system, you should check if your system is using an Intel or ARM (Apple Silicon) processor. If Intel, you can follow the same steps as for Linux. Otherwise, you must ensure that your conda environment enforces the Intel architecture to remain compatible with python-embree:

Create the environment for Intel architecture:

CONDA_SUBDIR=osx-64 conda create --name pyRTX-env -c conda-forge python=3.8

Activate and lock the architecture for this environment:

conda activate pyRTX-env
conda config --env --set subdir osx-64

Install the specific packages:

conda install -c conda-forge embree3 python-embree basemap

Step 2: Install pyRTX

Once the main dependencies are installed via Conda, you can install the pyRTX package from this repository using pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt .

After completing these steps, the pyRTX library will be fully installed and ready to use.

Quickstart and installation testing

Download the data required for running the examples running in the examples folder:

python download_lro_kernels.py

Once the test data (SPICE kernels) is downloaded you can test the installation. From the tests folder run

pytest