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Installing PROCESS

PROCESS is a command-line Python program. As such, it should be supported by a wide range of operating systems and Python versions above 3.10. However, we only test PROCESS on the latest Ubuntu with Python 3.10 and, therefore, we cannot guarantee its stability on other platforms.

Windows User

While it is probably possible to run PROCESS on Windows, we recommend that Windows users use WSL as PROCESS is not tested for nor built for Windows use.

To install Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) follow the 'Manual Installation Steps' here. Choose WSL 2 and Ubuntu 20 (if installing from the Microsoft store then Ubuntu 20 is installed by default).

The following command is used to install WSL (you need admin privileges to perform this command):

wsl --install

Differences between systems

PROCESS is a complex numerical code that performs thousands of calculations and, on certain systems (e.g. Mac and some non-Ubuntu Linux systems), we have observed that floating-point rounding error can slightly alter the results of individual models--they are not wrong, just different. However, in a code like PROCESS, this error could accumulate over many iterations of the optimiser to cause non-convergence/convergence to a very different design point. Issue #3972 shows that these differences and shows how these small errors can accumulate to slightly change a solution.

In some sections of the code, these differences between systems are more pronounced (e.g. where operations occur on ill-conditioned matrices). Therefore, in our test suite, we skip a couple of tests if the system is not Linux or has an ldd version less than 2.31 because of this floating-point rounding difference: you can look for tests using the skip_if_incompatible_system fixture. While we encourage users of all systems to use PROCESS, we highly recommend you check your results on our officially support systems (listed above) and Python versions.

Start by downloading the PROCESS source code using git:

git clone https://github.com/ukaea/PROCESS
cd PROCESS

Virtual Environment

It is software best-practice, especially for scientific software, to install software and its dependencies in a virtual environment. This will stop PROCESS and its dependencies interfering with other software installed on your system.

In Python, a virtual environment can be easily created by running:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Please note that every time you start a new terminal you will need to run:

source .venv/bin/activate

before trying to run PROCESS.

PROCESS and its dependencies can then be installed by simply running:

pip install .

PROCESS also uses poppler-utils to create PDF summary files, which can be installed by running: 

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y poppler-utils

This dependency is not mandatory as most of the functionality of PROCESS is available without it.

Examples

If you are new to PROCESS, you may want to run some of the examples in the examples/ directory. These will introduce you to the basic functionality of reactor design with PROCESS. The examples require additional dependencies that can be installed using: 

pip install '.[examples]'

Developers

Developers of PROCESS will want to install PROCESS in a slightly different way and with a few additional dependencies.

First, developers may require an editable install of PROCESS: where any changes made to PROCESS source code are automatically reflected when using PROCESS (there will be no need to re-install PROCESS when changes are made to the Python source code). This can be done by running:

pip install -e .

For developers looking to contribute code back to our GitHub repository via a pull request, installing pre-commit will ensure your code meets our quality standards. Please see our dedicated pre-commit documentation for details on how to install it development/pre-commit.

Finally, developers will want to check that their work has not broken anything in PROCESS. Our test suite runs large portions of the code and compares the result to the "correct" value, reporting any differences. The following optional dependencies of PROCESS will need to be installed to run the test suite:

pip install -e '.[examples, test]'

Documentation for running the test suite can be found at development/testing.