Downloading CIAO 4.16 and CALDB 4.11.6 with conda

Please be aware of the following issues before installing CIAO 4.16 (see the watchout page for more information):

• ciao-install setup inadvertently sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable that may cause non-CIAO applications to fail.

• CIAO is not compatible with macOS 15: Sequoia.

• macOS users must install recent versions of XQuartz and XCode

• CIAO 4.16 does not support 32-bit Linux, CentOS7, Windows (including Windows Subsystem for Linux, WSL) or macOS Catalina (10.15) and earlier.

Verify conda version. Users should be using conda version 4.7.6 or newer.

$ conda --version
conda 4.8.3

If conda is not installed - that is the following fails

$ conda --version
conda: Command not found.

then users can install miniforge from their GitHub website. Other vendors provide conda package management software. Users are responsible for reading and adhering to the Licenses and Terms of Services for any third party software they install.

deactivate base or any other environments

Depending on how conda is installed and setup, it may automatically activate the "base" environment in the terminal window. Users should deactivate this or any other environments before installing CIAO.

(base) $ conda deactivate
$

Install CIAO into a new conda environment.

$ conda create -n ciao-4.16 \
  -c https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao \
  -c conda-forge \
  ciao pyciao sherpa ds9 ciao-contrib caldb_main marx python=3.11

CIAO-4.16 is available with Python 3.11, 3.10, or 3.9. Unless a different version is needed, users should specify python=3.11, otherwise the default will be determined based on the other packages available on conda-forge channel at the time of installation. To request a specific version, use python=3.9, python=3.10, or python=3.11 to the conda create line.

Users may also wish to include packages such as jupyter, astropy and scipy into their new CIAO conda environment. The caldb_main package is the base CalDB, while the additional background files are contained in the acis_bkg_evt and hrc_bkg_evt packages. The caldb package is the entire CalDB which can be used in lieu of the three previously mentioned CalDB packages.

CIAO 4.16 requires conda-forge channel

Updating to the latest version of XSpec requires CIAO to use a version of libgfortran which is not available in the default channel. Users will therefore need to include the conda-forge channel when they install CIAO 4.16

It is strongly recommended to create a new conda environment for CIAO 4.16 rather than trying to upgrade an environment containing an older version of CIAO.

Problem with downloading XSPEC models or CALDB

Users experiencing problems downloading the CALDB files and/or the XSPEC model files can follow the Alternative download instructions.

Activate the CIAO environment:

$ conda activate ciao-4.16
  -or-
$ source activate ciao-4.16

By default, the terminal prompt will change to show the currently active conda environment. Users can also run the ciaover command to verify that they are setup correctly.

% ciaover -v
The current environment is configured for:
  CIAO        : CIAO 4.16.0 Tuesday, December 05, 2023
  Contrib     : Package release 2  Tuesday, August 20, 2024
  bindir      : /soft/ciao-4.16/bin
  Python path : /soft/ciao-4.16/bin
  CALDB       : 4.11.6

System information:
Linux is.awesome.edu 4.18.0-477.13.1.el8_8.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu May 18 10:27:05 EDT 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Users may want to create an alias so that they only need to type ciao to activate their environment.

MARX setup

If you installed marx then you should do the following, so that scripts such as simulate_psf and the dax options in DS9 will work correctly:

(ciao-4.16) $ conda env config vars set MARX_ROOT=$CONDA_PREFIX

This command only needs to be run once.

If you are going to be using marx directly then you can find the parameter files in the directory

$CONDA_PREFIX/share/marx/pfiles

(ciao-4.16) $ cd $ASCDS_INSTALL
(ciao-4.16) $ bash test/smoke/bin/run_smoke_tests.sh

If there are any errors reported during the smoke tests, users can check the smoke test bugs page for possible solutions.