Installing ecco_access

Preliminaries

The ecco_access package runs Python code, so you will first need a Python setup on your machine. Python is an open-source programming language, so no commercial software or licenses are necessary to run it. Miniforge is preferred for many users as it is a no-frills conda/mamba installation that defaults to the conda-forge channel of Python packages, where ecco_access is distributed. ecco_access can also be downloaded by users of other Python installers such as Anaconda or PyPI, see below.

Note

Currently ecco_access requires Python >= 3.11 to run correctly; this is due to the requirements of Zarr 3 which ecco_access depends on. If this becomes an impediment to users, we will add compatibility with earlier versions of Python.

Installing with conda/mamba

ecco_access can be downloaded with the conda package management system, which is very helpful because conda typically will install all required dependencies and handle any package incompatibility issues. mamba has very similar functionality and syntax to conda, but is coded in C++ and is often faster than conda.

To install using conda (requires a Miniforge/Miniconda/Anaconda installation):

conda install ecco_access

Or equivalently in mamba (available to Miniforge users):

mamba install ecco_access

If for some reason the above command returns an error (especially if using Anaconda), include the -c option to point to the channel where the package is found (conda-forge).

conda install -c conda-forge ecco_access

Installing with PyPI

If you do not have a conda/mamba installation or prefer to work with the Python Package Index (PyPI), ecco_access can be installed with the pip command.

pip install ecco-access

Cloning the GitHub repository

If you might like to contribute new features or code improvements to ecco_access, you can clone the code repository from GitHub. You will need git installed and a GitHub account. It is also recommended for security purposes to set up an HTTPS Personal Access Token or SSH key.

If you are planning to contribute to ecco_access development, please create your own fork by navigating to the repository. Then while logged in to your account on GitHub, click the “Fork” button on the upper-right part of the page, and create a fork with you as owner; the repository name can remain the same. The resulting fork will be {your_username}/ECCO-ACCESS.

Then to clone your fork of the ecco_access code repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/{your_username}/ECCO-ACCESS.git

or using an SSH key:

git clone git@github.com:{your_username}/ECCO-ACCESS.git