Getting Facets

Facets is a Python package that works with Python 2.6.x or Python 2.7.x. It does not currently work with Python 3.x.x. Before proceeding you should make sure that your system has one of the supported versions of Python installed.

In order to use Facets you’ll need to:

• Download the current Facets source code.
• Install Facets by building the C extension modules and setting up your PYTHONPATH.
• Download and install additional Python packages used by Facets.

Downloading Facets

The Facets source code can be downloaded from:

• https://github.com/davidmorrill/facets

If you are working from a command shell and have git installed, you can use the following command to create a local copy of the Facets source code repository on your system:

git clone https://github.com/davidmorrill/facets.git

Installing Facets

Note

This section covers the installation procedure for the alpha version of Facets and will be replaced with updated documentation once the beta stage is reached.

Since this is alpha level software and subject to frequent update and change, it is not recommended that Facets be installed into your Python site_packages folder. You should use the following procedure instead:

• Download the Facets source code and make the top-level Facets directory (i.e. the one containing the setup.py file) your current working directory:

  cd facets

• Run the following command to build the two Facets C extension modules:

  python setup.py build_ext --inplace

  This command compiles the extension modules directly into the Facets source code tree.

  If you get an error message under Windows, you may have to add an option like --compiler=msvc to specify the correct compiler for building the extension modules:

  python setup.py build_ext --inplace --compiler=msvc

• Finally, add the top-level Facets directory (i.e. the one containing the setup.py file) to your PYTHONPATH environment variable.

Updating Facets

If you update the Facets source code from the GitHub repository, simply re-run the Python set-up command described in the Installing Facets section to re-build the Facets C extension modules.

In practice, the source code for these modules does not change very often, so it is usually not necessary run the set-up procedure each time you update the Facets source. If you do decide to skip this step however, and get unexpected results when running any Facets-based code, try running the set-up procedure again before doing any further investigation into the problem.

Facets Prerequisites

Before you can use Facets, you must also install the following additional Python packages:

numpy

Numeric Python (http://numpy.scipy.org/). For Windows binaries, also see: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/.

PyQt4

Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit (http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/software/pyqt/download). For Windows binaries, also see: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/.

This package is needed for creating graphical user interfaces (GUI’s) using Facets.

Note

Facets uses a user interface abstraction layer that allows it to be used with other cross platform GUI toolkits. However, the alpha level code has only been extensively tested using the PyQt4 toolkit. It is anticipated that the beta version will support the following additional GUI toolkits:

wxPython

Python bindings for the wxWindows GUI toolkit.

PySide

An alternative set of Python bindings for the Qt GUI toolkit released under a more liberal license than PyQt4.