Installation Guide

Requirements

The IDV (unidata.ucar.edu/idv) is an all-platform, click-to install visualization package.

Jupyter is all-platform software, most easily by installing Anaconda

The IDV is oriented toward GUI operation on single-user workstations with screens, but sysadmins can install it on multiuser servers. It can run headless (without the GUI or screen) for scripted services, using the IDV Scripting Language (ISL, suffix .isl). In fact, .isl scripting underlies many DRILSDOWN capabilities.

Installation

Tier I: IDV and our enhancements

Install the latest version of IDV here. The newest DRILSDOWN developments go into the nightly build (currently, version 5.5u1), so this link directs you to that.

Within the IDV, perform menu operations under Tools–>Plugin Manager to install Customized IDVs –> MapesIDVcollection.jar (the .jar is stored in this repo).

Install a command-line tool called idv_teleport. This is a user-friendly translator to .isl scripts that will replace or ‘teleport’ the displayed area and time range of an existing (‘template’) code-only IDV bundle (.xidv file). If template.xidv uses data sources that are large aggregations (local or remote), then idv_teleport can turn a list of space-time coordinates (‘case coordinates’) into a set of zipped IDV code+data (.zidv) files containing identical, arbitrarily complex 3D displays of basic and derived quantities for those cases, in a background or batch mode.

Tier II: IDV interactions with jupyter + iPython

In addition to Tier I, install jupyter, for instance using Anaconda.

Install our iPython extension, drilsdown.py, from pip or conda.

pip install drilsdown or conda install drilsdown

Tier III: Storing and servicing {IDV + Jupyter} “Case Studies” on RAMADDA
In addition to the IDV and Jupyter, you need

  1. Access (username and password, or knowledge of an anonymous-accessible area) granted by the Admin of a RAMADDA repository.

  2. In order to publish your {IDV + Jupyter} “Case Studies” you should install the RAMADDA plugin to IDV. This is available in the IDV’s Tools–>Plugin manager.

Tier IV: Install your own RAMADDA with DRILSDOWN functionality

To install a RAMADDA repository, follow instructions here Then, put drilsdownplugin.jar in your repository’s plugins/ directory, and restart it.

To have your Case Study .ipynb files rendered by jupyter’s nbconvert service, install jupyter on your RAMADDA’s host machine, and add this line to .properties file in your ramadda home directory (or to repository.properties, in a Tomcat installation):

*ramadda.jupyter.path=*``/path/to/jupyter``