Developer Installation

Installing ActivitySim as a developer is almost as easy as just using it, but making some tweaks to the processes enables live code development and testing.

Package Manager

ActivitySim has a lot of dependencies. It’s easiest and fastest to install them using a package manager like conda, or its faster and free sibling Mambaforge. Depending on your security settings, you might need to install in a container like docker, instructions for that are coming soon.

Note that if you are installing mamba, you only should install mamba in the base environment. If you install mamba itself in other environments, it will not function correctly. If you’ve got an existing conda installation and you want to install mamba into it, you can install mamba into the base environment like this:

conda update conda -n base
conda install -n base -c conda-forge mamba

While you are at it, if you are a Jupyter user you might want to also install nb_conda_kernels in your base conda environment alongside any other jupyter libraries:

mamba install -n base nb_conda_kernels -c conda-forge

This will ensure your development environments are selectable as kernels in Jupyter Notebook/Lab/Etc.

Environment

It’s convenient to start from a completely clean conda environment and git repository. Assuming you have mamba installed, and you want to install in a new directory called “workspace” run:

mkdir workspace
cd workspace
mamba env create -p ASIM-ENV --file https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ActivitySim/activitysim/main/conda-environments/activitysim-dev-base.yml
conda activate ./ASIM-ENV
git clone https://github.com/ActivitySim/sharrow.git
python -m pip install -e ./sharrow
git clone https://github.com/ActivitySim/activitysim.git
python -m pip install -e ./activitysim

Note the above commands will create an environment with all the necessary dependencies, clone both ActivitySim and sharrow from GitHub, and pip install each of these libraries in editable mode, which will allow your code changes to be reflected when running ActivitySim in this environment.

Depending on what you are working on, you may want to check out a branch other than develop. To do so, you can point the git switch command above to any other existing branch name. If you want to start an new branch, first create it with git branch cool-new-feature and then switch to it with git switch cool-new-feature.

Now your environment should be ready to use. Happy coding!

Important

If you add to the ActivitySim dependencies, make sure to also update the environments in conda-environments, which are used for testing and development.