Installation

Requirements

The requirements for installing RHEAS include

Thankfully most of these requirements are automatically installed using Buildout, a Python-based build system for creating, assembling and deploying applications from multiple parts.

In terms of hardware, the recommended requirements include any modern computer system with hard drive storage of at least 250 GB, and memory of at least 4 GB.

Installing on Linux and MacOS

In order to compile RHEAS, we need a C compiler and the Make utilities, as well as some other software packages. Depending on the Linux distribution these can be installed

sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo dnf install scipy numpy gdal-devel python-dateutil libxslt-devel python-lxml libxslt-python readline-devel geos-devel proj-devel Cython pyproj python-pandas wine

for RPM-based distros (such as RedHat, Fedora, Centos)

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude -y upgrade
sudo aptitude -y install git build-essential python-numpy python-scipy python-gdal python-argparse python-dateutil libgdal-dev libproj-dev libxslt-dev libreadline-dev cython python-pandas
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude -y install wine winetricks

for DEB-based distros (such as Ubuntu, Debian, Mint)

If you’re on a MacOS, the easiest way to install the dependencies is by using the Homebrew package manager. Follow the instructions to install Homebrew and then run

brew update
brew install python readline gdal netcdf wine winetricks sfcgal
pip install numpy scipy gdal argparse py-dateutil lxml requests

We then clone and uncompress the software archive

git clone https://github.com/nasa/RHEAS.git
cd RHEAS

and then run the buildout script. Before that, we boostrap the build by running

python bootstrap.py

After that we can install everything by running

./bin/buildout

The buildout script will install the PostgresQL database along with the PostGIS extension, and create a database for the user. The script will also install some additional Python modules, and build the VIC hydrology model.

After the script finishes you should have a rheas executable in your bin directory!

Installing on Windows

It is currently possible to run RHEAS in a bash-shell environment such as Cygwin. However, due to backwards compatibility issues with PostGIS dependencies, this method is not currently recommended.

Testing the installation

A number of unit tests have been created to validate the installation of RHEAS. The tests create a temporary database and perform the following operations:

  • Download and ingest the suite of datasets into the database
  • Run nowcasts for VIC and DSSAT
  • Run forecasts for VIC and DSSAT

The tests can be run with

./bin/test