Getting Started

Prerequisites

This package requires;

• a linux environment or docker for Windows
• python version 3.8.10
• Miniconda (if you are planning to install it using conda)

Basic use installation via conda or pip

This package should be installed by run;

conda install -c bodc coast

However, there is also the option of;

pip install COAsT

(Optional): Extra python packages

In order to try the Examples described in this documentation, you may also need to install the following python packages (as they are not natively part of the COAsT package):

# cartopy
pip install cartopy
# xesmf
pip install xesmf

Development use installation

If you would prefer to work with a clone of the repository in a development python environment do the following. First clone the repository in the place where you want to work:

git clone https://github.com/British-Oceanographic-Data-Centre/COAsT.git
cd COAsT

Then build a python environment:

conda env update --prune --file environment.yml 
conda activate coast

The last step is to install the coast package on this environment:

pip install -e .

Building the docker image and executing an interactive environment

Warning: Building the image is resource heavy

After cloning the repo (as above):

docker build . --tag coast
docker compose up -d
docker compose exec coast bash

You can now start a python session and import coast. Docker compose mounts 3 directories from you host machine onto the docker container:

./example_files:/example_files   
./config:/config  
./example_scripts:/example_scripts  

Check the installation!

Start by opening a python terminal and then importing COAsT:

import coast

Before using coast, we will just check if the installation process (Anaconda or pip) has installed correct package versions. In the python console copy the following:

import gsw
import matplotlib
print(gsw.__version__)
print(matplotlib.__version__)

The output should be

3.4.0
3.5.1

or later. If it is, great carry on. If it is not, problems may occur with some functionality in coast. In this case, please update these packages versions.

Test it!

In order to test the package, example data files and configuration files are recommended.

Example data files

Download example files and link them into a new directory:

wget -c https://linkedsystems.uk/erddap/files/COAsT_example_files/COAsT_example_files.zip &&  unzip COAsT_example_files.zip && rm -f COAsT_example_files.zip

Example configuration files

To facilitate loading different types of data, key information is passed to COAsT using configuration files. The config files used in the Examples are in the repository, or can be downloaded as static files:

wget -c https://github.com/British-Oceanographic-Data-Centre/COAsT/archive/refs/heads/master.zip && unzip master.zip && rm -f master.zip
mv COAsT-master/config ./ && rm -rf COAsT-master

Explore the API Reference Page to access detailed information about specific objects and methods. Additionally, you can find practical usage examples on the example pages.

IMPORTANT: If you are utilizing COAsT at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) on Liverpool Servers, kindly access this link on the NOC Intranet for additional details.