You will need some way to manage files, connect to SLAC computers and open display windows. Generally that will be a combination of using terminal windows and an X-windows systems for graphics.
The simplest command line environment on a mac is the built in terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)
Here are a couple of simple guides for using terminals:
You can explore those more later. For now you just need to be able to open an terminal
The X Windows system is a very common way to open connections to and send graphics from processes running on remote computers. It is generically useful and we recommend you install it if you are using a mac laptop.
You are going to need some way to edit files. I strongly recommend that you do not use "TextEdit" to try and edit software files.
There are many different options, here is a summary of some of your choices:
The tools that you are most likely to need on your personal computer in order to do research "git", which is a file versioning system and "conda", which is a combination of python and a software package management system.
git is a versioning system that is pretty ubiquitous in our work. It lets many users work together to manage a large set of files. This can be set of software, or a paper draft, or some documentation, or pretty much any kind of files.
I recommend using the instructions under using "Install Git Using Xcode" on the page below:
Running the following command in a terminal window will setup git and use it to "clone" this BootCamp:
# Install xcode and git if you have not already done so
xcode-select --install
# "Clone" this repository into a directory called "BootCamp"
git clone https://github.com/KIPAC/BootCamp.git
(The lines that start with '#' are comments.)
conda is a combination of python and a software package management system. You can either install the full anaconda package or your can install miniconda, a minimal installer that bootstraps itself and only installs the package you need.
Note that the full anaconda distribution comes with a lot of tutorials and extra things, so you might want to install that version.
You can download the macOS version of anaconda from here:
I recommend installing anaconda under '/Applications'.
Then you can do Applications -> Anaconda-Navigator
Then, in the "Home" tab of Anaconda-Navigator you can select "Launch" in the "Notebook" app box. This will start a local notebook servers and open a web-browser window in your home directory.
Once you have installed anaconda you can also set up your terminal windows to activate conda for that terminal by doing this:
# Activate conda
. /Applications/anaconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
# "Activate" the "base" conda environment
conda activate
(The lines that start with '#' are comments.)
You can download miniconda from there, (make sure to get the python 3 version):
If you go the route of installing miniconda there are a number of packages, such as jupyter notebooks that you will likely need to install.
Running the following commands in a terminal window will install a minimal set of packages to let you run jupyter notebooks locally.
# Activate conda, if you ran conda init when you installed
# miniconda you don't need to do this
. /Users/echarles/miniconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
# Create a conda environment to work these examples
conda create --name kipac python
# Install the stuff you need (from the conda-forge software 'channel')
conda install --name kipac -c conda-forge numpy scipy jupyter
# "Activate" the kipac environment
conda activate kipac
(The lines that start with '#' are comments.)
Alternatively, you can run
conda env create -f kipac-env.yaml
conda activate kipac
to create and activate an environment named kipac that has been prepared in advance.
Note that you will need to run
conda activate kipac
each time you begin a new session (i.e., open a terminal).
f you want to start a notebook you can then do:
# Start a notebook server in the current directory that you are in
jupyter notebook
Once you have started a notebook server you will want to navigate to the notebook that you want to run. Let's start with the basic python / notebook tutorial. In your browser you can selection that notebook to open it.
BootCamp ->Python -> Python (1).ipynb
Note. You can get you notebook browser to start up in a different folder in a few different ways. For example you could:
# Version one, go to a directory and start the notebook server there
cd ~/BootCamp/Python
jupyter notebook
# Version two, use the --notebook-dir option
jupyter notebook --notebook-dir="BootCamp/Python"