Installation

Basic Installation

cis_interface can be installed from either PyPI using pip:

$ pip install cis_interface

or by cloning the Git repository on Github:

$ git clone https://github.com/cropsinsilico/cis_interface.git

and then building the distribution.:

$ cd cis_interface
$ python setup.py install

If you do not have admin privileges on the target machine, --user can be added to either the pip or setup.py installation commands.

Additional Steps on Windows

As local communication on Windows is handled by ZeroMQ, running models written in C or C++ will require installing the ZeroMQ libraries for C and C++.

Instructions for installing the ZeroMQ C and C++ libraries can be found here

Additional Steps for Matlab Models

To run Matlab models, you will also need to install the Matlab engine for Python. This requires that you have an existing Matlab installation and license.

Instructions for installing the Matlab engine as a python package can be found here.

Additional Steps for RabbitMQ Message Passing

RabbitMQ connections allow messages to be passed between models when the models are not running on the same machine. To use these connections (those with the prefix ‘RMQ’), the framework must have access to a RabbitMQ server. If you have access to an existing RabbitMQ server, the information for that server can either be provided to the RabbitMQ connection driver (See cis_interface.drivers.RMQDriver.RMQDriver) or added to the cis_interface config file (See Configuration Options for information on setting config options).

Starting a local RabbitMQ Server is also relatively easy. Details on downloading, installing, and starting a RabbitMQ server can be found here. The default values for RabbitMQ related properties in the config file are set to the defaults for starting a RabbitMQ server.