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| Installing Topographica with version controlVersion control allows you to keep up to date with the latest changes made by other developers, and allows you to keep track of your own changes. Topographica's source code is held in a central Subversion (SVN) repository on SourceForge.net; the repository contains the files making up Topographica itself (including its documentation), plus source code versions of most of the various external libraries needed by Topographica. Note that documentation may change between releases, so developers (and others) who want to use a version-controlled copy of Topographica should be reading the nightly documentation build rather than the previous release's documentation at topographica.org. Also note that the SVN version is occasionally not usable due to work in progress, but you can check to see if the code currently builds on a specific platform, or if our suite of code tests pass, by visiting our automatic tests page. Finally, please bear in mind that most of Topographica's development occurs under Linux, so if you have a choice that is the best-supported option. Downloading TopographicaTo install a version-controlled copy of Topographica, you first need to obtain a copy of the SVN repository, either by using SVN as described in our SVN instructions, or by using an alternative version control system that can interact with SVN. We ourselves also use and support the distributed version control system Git; developers who wish to use this should instead follow our git instructions. Installing TopographicaOnce you have obtained the
version-controlled (Option 1) Installing Topographica's dependencies on your systemBinaries of Topographica's dependencies are available for many platforms, and many package managers also include them. Alternatively, all Topographica's dependencies (and more!) are available for many platforms in scientific Python distributions such as EPD (free for academic use). If installing the dependencies yourself, you will need at least Python, NumPy, and PIL, and preferably MatPlotLib, gmpy, SciPy, and IPython as well. Step-by-step instructions: Mac OSX; Ubuntu (and other apt-based systems). Once you have installed the necessary environment, you can create
a PYTHON="/usr/bin/env python2.6" shoud be adapted to the
location of your copy of Python if necessary).
Note that you should not run setup.py, since that would install
Topographica into your system's Python directory, whereas we want to
use the version-controlled directory. Also, you can delete
the (Option 2) Build all Topographica's dependenciesBuilding Topographica's dependencies is usually straightforward on Mac and Linux. Before beginning, you need to ensure your system has the prerequisites described below.Mac OS XBuilding Topographica on OS X should be straightforward. Assuming you are using OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), you need to install Apple's Xcode3 if your system does not already have it. Xcode provides the required GCC C/C++ compiler (among other development utilities). You can then follow the instructions below for building Topographica. LinuxMost Linux systems will already have the required libraries installed, so usually no action will be required here. On some Linux distributions that start with a minimal set of
packages included, such as Ubuntu or the various "live CD" systems,
you may need to install "build tools". On Ubuntu, for instance, these
are installed via Also on these minimal linux distributions, if you want to build and
use the GUI you may need to specify explicitly that some standard
libraries be installed:
Once any necessary libraries are installed, you can proceed to the Building instructions below. Building TopographicaThe instructions below assume you have followed any necessary platform-specific instructions described above. You will need a writable directory with approximately 1.2 GB of space available (as of July 2010). Enter the directory where topographica is located and type
If you have problems during the build process, try
adding optional: If desired, you can also make local copies of the
HTML documentation from the web site. To do so, you must have the php,
bibtex, convert, and fig2dev commands installed; type If building was successful, a script
named After installationTo launch Topographica itself, you can enter For actual use, you will probably want to add a symbolic link in a
directory that is in your regular path, pointing to the topographica
script. The instructions elsewhere in the documentation assume that
you have done so, so that you only need to type
You can check that Topographica is working as expected by running
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