Installing spectral-cube

Requirements

This package has the following dependencies:

  • Python Python 3.10 or later

  • Numpy 1.24 or later

  • Astropy 6.1 or later

  • radio_beam 0.3.5 or later, used when reading in spectral cubes that use the BMAJ/BMIN convention for specifying the beam size.

  • Bottleneck, optional (speeds up median and percentile operations on cubes with missing data)

  • Regions >=0.7, optional (Serialises/Deserialises DS9/CRTF region files and handles them. Used when extracting a subcube from region)

  • scipy 1.8.1 or later, optional (used for subcube creation)

  • dask 2025.1.1 or later, used for the DaskSpectralCube class

  • zarr 2.12 or later and fsspec 2022.5.0 or later, used for storing computations to disk when using the dask-enabled classes.

  • casa-formats-io 0.1 or later

Installation

To install the latest stable release, you can type:

pip install spectral-cube

(you may need to add --upgrade if you already have an older version installed) or you can download the latest tar file from PyPI and install it using:

python setup.py install

If you are using python2.7 (e.g., if you are using CASA version 5 or earlier), the latest spectral-cube version that is compatible is v0.4.4. Note that Astropy v2.0 <https://docs.astropy.org/en/v2.0.16/install.html>__ is the last version to support python2.7.

Developer version

If you want to install the latest developer version of the spectral cube code, you can do so from the git repository:

git clone https://github.com/radio-astro-tools/spectral-cube.git
cd spectral-cube
python setup.py install

You may need to add the --user option to the last line if you do not have root access. You can also install the latest developer version in a single line with pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/radio-astro-tools/spectral-cube.git

Installing into CASA

Installing packages in CASA is fairly straightforward. The process is described here. In short, you can do the following:

First, we need to make sure pip is installed. Start up CASA as normal, and type:

CASA <1>: from setuptools.command import easy_install

CASA <2>: easy_install.main(['--user', 'pip'])

Now, quit CASA and re-open it, then type the following to install spectral-cube:

CASA <1>: import subprocess, sys

CASA <2>: subprocess.check_call([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'install', '--user', 'spectral-cube'])

For CASA versions 5 and earlier, you need to install a specific version of spectral-cube because more recent versions of spectral-cube require python3.:

CASA <1>: import subprocess, sys

CASA <2>: subprocess.check_call([sys.executable, '-m', 'pip', 'install', '--user', 'spectral-cube==v0.4.4'])