Gamma-ray Data Tools - Core Components

The Gamma-ray Data Tools (GDT) is centralized toolkit for hard X-ray and gamma-ray astrophysics data analysis, with a focus on providing a uniform interface to the data provided by several different missions and instruments.

The GDT Core Package (astro-gdt) contains the core components of the GDT that can be utilized for various instruments and is a generalized version of the Fermi GBM Data Tools. Individual mission or instrument packages can be developed using astro-gdt and released under the gdt.missions namespace (see astro-gdt-fermi as an example).

The full documentation can be found here.

Normal Installation

If you don't plan to contribute code to the project, the recommended install method is installing from PyPI using:

pip install astro-gdt
gdt-data init

The gdt-data init is required to initialize the library after installation.

Setting up a development environment

If you do want to contribute code to this project (and astro-gdt), you can use the following commands to quickly setup a development environment:

mkdir gdt-devel
cd gdt-devel
python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel
git clone git@github.com:USRA-STI/gdt-core.git
pip install -e gdt-core/
gdt-data init
pip install -r gdt-core/requirements.txt

This should result in git-devel having the following directory structure:

.
├── venv
└── gdt-core

with gdt-core installed in the virtual environment named venv.

Writing Extensions using Namespace Packaging

Gamma-ray Data Tools encourages missions to write extensions using namespace packages. Please use our Fermi extension as an example of how we expect other missions to contribute extensions to the Gamma-ray Data Tools.

The extension package should contain a directory 'gdt' with a subdirectory 'missions' which will hold the extension code in a package directory named after the mission.

For example, GDT-Fermi has the following directory layout:

.
├── config
├── dist
├── docs
├── src
│   └── gdt
│      └── missions
│          └── fermi
│              ├── gbm
│              │   └── __init__.py
│              ├── lat
│              │   └── __init__.py
│              └── __init__.py
└── tests
  └── missions
      └── fermi

Since GDT-Fermi uses namespace packaging, both src/gdt and src/gdt/missions do not contain a file named __init__.py. This is because they are Namespace packages.

Notice that directory src/gdt/mission/fermi and its subdirectories contains an __init__.py file signalling to Python that those directories are regular packages.

You can learn more about Namespace packages by reading PEP-420.

Helping with Documentation

You can contribute additions and changes to the documentation. In order to use sphinx to compile the documentation source files, we recommend that you install the packages contained within requirments.txt.

To compile the documentation, use the following commands:

cd gdt-core/docs
make html