Installation and Testing

Installation via pip is the recommended method for all users. Manual method is only recommended for advanced users. Please note that if you have used any of these methods to install NURBS-Python, please use the same method to upgrade to the latest version.

Note

On some Linux and MacOS systems, you may encounter 2 different versions of Python installed. In that case Python 2.x package would use python2 and pip2, whereas Python 3.x package would use python3 and pip3. The default python and pip commands could be linked to one of those. Please check your installed Python version via python -V to make sure that you are using the correct Python package.

Install via Pip

The easiest method to install/upgrade NURBS-Python is using pip. The following commands will download and install NURBS-Python from Python Package Index.

$ pip install --user geomdl

Upgrading to the latest version:

$ pip install geomdl --upgrade

Installing a specific version:

$ pip install --user geomdl==5.0.0

Manual Install

The initial step of the manual install is cloning the repository via git or downloading the ZIP archive from the repository page on GitHub. The package includes a setup.py script which will take care of the installation and automatically copy/link the required files to your Python distribution’s site-packages directory.

The most convenient method to install NURBS-Python manually is using pip:

$ pip install --user .

To upgrade, please pull the latest commits from the repository via git pull --rebase and then execute the above command.

Development Mode

The following command enables development mode by creating a link from the directory where you cloned NURBS-Python repository to your Python distribution’s site-packages directory:

$ pip install --user -e .

Since this command only generates a link to the library directory, pulling the latest commits from the repository would be enough to update the library to the latest version.

Checking Installation

If you would like to check if you have installed the package correctly, you may try to print geomdl.__version__ variable after import. The following example illustrates installation check on a Windows PowerShell instance:

Windows PowerShell
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

PS C:\> python
Python 3.6.2 (v3.6.2:5fd33b5, Jul  8 2017, 04:57:36) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import geomdl
>>> geomdl.__version__
'4.0.2'
>>>

Testing

The package includes tests/ directory which contains all the automated testing scripts. These scripts require pytest installed on your Python distribution. Then, you can execute the following from your favorite IDE or from the command line:

$ pytest

pytest will automatically find the tests under tests/ directory, execute them and show the results.

Compile with Cython

To improve performance, the Core Library of NURBS-Python can be compiled and installed using the following command along with the pure Python version.

$ SETUPTOOLS_USE_CYTHON=1 pip install --user .

After the successful execution of the command, the you can import and use the compiled library as follows:

 1# Importing NURBS module
 2from geomdl.core import NURBS
 3# Importing visualization module
 4from geomdl.visualization import VisMPL as vis
 5
 6# Creating a curve instance
 7crv = NURBS.Curve()
 8
 9# Make a quadratic curve
10crv.degree = 2
11
12#######################################################
13# Skipping control points and knot vector assignments #
14#######################################################
15
16# Set the visualization component and render the curve
17crv.vis = vis.VisCurve3D()
18crv.render()

Before the Cython compilation, please make sure that you have a valid compiler installed for your operating system.