Installation

dms_tools is freely available. Here are instructions on how to install the package.

Quick installation

If your system already has the appropriate required software, you can install dms_tools with the simple command:

pip install dms_tools --user

If this command fails, then read the instructions below.

dms_tools requires Python

dms_tools is written in Python, and is compatible with Python version 2.7. So before installing dms_tools, making sure you have Python version 2.7 installed.

Where to install

You need to figure out where you want to install dms_tools. Global installation using sudo is not recommended for Python packages in general.

The simplest solution is to install locally via the --user option to pip, which by default on Linux will install into the ~/.local/ directory.

In order for locally installed programs to be accessible, you need to add ~/.local/bin/ to the PATH variable, and ~/.local/lib/ to the PYTHONPATH variable. If you are using the bash shell, you would do this by adding the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file:

PATH=$HOME/.local/bin/:$PATH
export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/.local/lib/python2.7:$PATH

You then want to make sure that your ~/.bash_profile file simple sources your ~/.bashrc file as described here by making ~/.bash_profile consist of the following contents:

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
    source ~/.bashrc
fi

On Mac OS X, the default directory for --user may be $HOME/Library/Python/x.y/ rather than ~/.local/ where x.y indicates the version number (e.g., 2.7.

Installing with pip and --user

Once you have taken care of the steps above, you can then simply install with pip.

First, make sure pip is installed

First, check if you already have pip installed. You can do this by typing at the command line:

pip -h

If you get the help message for pip, then pip is already installed and you can move to the next step. If you instead get an error message such as -bash: pip: command not found then you need to install pip.

If you have easy_install installed, then you can simply install pip with:

easy_install pip --user

If this fails (e.g., you don’t have easy_install available either), then install pip by following the instructions here.

Next, use pip to install dms_tools

Once pip is installed, you can do a local installation with:

pip install dms_tools --user

Using a virtual environment

The other good option is to use pip to install into a virtual environment as described here

Upgrading your dms_tools version with pip

If you have previously installed dms_tools but are not sure that you have the latest version, you can upgrade using pip. To do this for a local installation, use:

pip install dms_tools --user --upgrade

Install dms_tools from source code

You can also install from the dms_tools source code on GitHub. If you do this, you may have to manually make sure that you have also installed the Other required software.

To install from source, first download the dms_tools source code from GitHub. After unpacking the main dms_tools directory that contains this source, install locally with:

cd dms_tools
python setup.py install --user

Other required software

dms_tools requires Python. In addition it requires the following external Python packages. If you are installing with pip, these external packages will automatically be installed. If you are installing from source, you may need to install these packages yourself.

The required packages are listed in the setup.py file.

License

dms_tools source code is available on GitHub under an open-source GPLv3 license. Part of the code utilized by dms_tools is based on weblogo, which is licensed under the GPL-compatible BSD 3-clause license.