Getting Started

Prerequisites

Thicket has the following minimum requirements, which must be installed before Thicket is run:

  1. Python 3 (3.6 - 3.11)

  2. hatchet

  3. pandas >= 1.1

  4. numpy

  5. matplotlib, and

  6. scipy

Other Packages

  1. Extrap: extrap, matplotlib

  2. Vis: beautifulsoup4

  3. Plotting: seaborn

For installation options for the extra packages, refer to the installation instructions below in Install and Build Thicket. Thicket is available on GitHub.

Installation

You can get thicket from its GitHub repository using this command:

$ git clone https://github.com/llnl/thicket.git

This will create a directory called thicket.

Install and Build Thicket

To build thicket and update your PYTHONPATH, run the following shell script from the thicket root directory:

$ source ./install.sh

Note: The source keyword is required to update your PYTHONPATH environment variable. It is not necessary if you have already manually added the thicket directory to your PYTHONPATH.

Alternatively, you can install thicket using pip:

$ pip install llnl-thicket

You can install the other packages mentioned above for additional features of thicket. Below is an example of installing thicket with extrap.

$ pip install llnl-thicket[extrap]

Check Installation

After installing thicket, you should be able to import thicket when running the Python interpreter in interactive mode:

$ python
Python 3.7.4 (default, Jul 11 2019, 01:08:00)
[Clang 10.0.1 (clang-1001.0.46.4)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Typing import thicket at the prompt should succeed without any error messages:

>>> import thicket
>>>

Interactive Visualization

Thicket provides an interactive visualization which can be run inside of your Jupyter notebooks. It is dependent on different mechanism for building, which we describe here.

The software in the thicket/vis subdirectory (i.e., the thicket.vis package) requires Node.js and the Node Package Manager (NPM) for the development and building of JavaScript code.

Building Visualization Code for Users

If you are just using our built-in visualizations, the visualization code will be built automatically when you access the thicket.vis module. All that users have to do is make sure they have NPM installed. If NPM is not installed, accessing the thicket.vis module will raise a FileNotFoundError.

Building Visualization Code for Developers

If you are developing a visualization, it is recommended that you build the visualization code manually. To manually build this code, follow the instructions below.

Installing Node Packages

Once you have Node and NPM installed on your system, you can install all necessary node packages by running the following line in your terminal from the thicket/vis directory:

>>> npm install

Building Out JavaScript Code with Webpack

To build out JavaScript into the static bundles used by the Jupyter visualizations, run the following line from the thicket/vis directory in your terminal:

>>> npm run build

Alternatively, you can run the following line to force bundles to automatically update when you change the JavaScript source code:

>>> npm run watch