Shyft Documentation
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Shyft is an open source hydrological toolbox developed at Statkraft. It is optimized for highly efficient modeling of hydrologic processes following the paradigm of distributed, lumped parameter models -- with recent developments introducing more physically based / process-level methods.

Shyft's primary end-user documentation is at Shyft readthedocs, where you will find instructions for installing Shyft and getting up and running with the tools it provides.

We also maintain this README file with basic instructions for building Shyft from a developer perspective.

IMPORTANT: While Shyft is being developed to support Linux and Windows platforms, it should be noted that the instructions contained in this README are geared toward linux systems. Users will generally want to readthedocs first.

Shyft is developed by Statkraft, and the two main initial authors to the C++ core were Sigbjørn Helset Sigbjorn.Helset@statkraft.com and Ola Skavhaug ola@xal.no.

Orchestration and the Python wrappers were originally developed by John F. Burkhart john.burkhart@statkraft.com with later contributions from Yisak Sultan Abdella yisaksultan.abdella@statkraft.com

Copyright (C) Sigbjørn Helset (SiH), John F. Burkhart (JFB), Ola Skavhaug (OS), Yisak Sultan Abdella (YAS), Statkraft AS

Contributors and current project participants include:

• Sigbjørn Helset Sigbjorn.Helset@statkraft.com
• Ola Skavhaug ola@xal.no
• John Burkhart John.Burkhart@statkraft.com
• Yisak Sultan Abdella YisakSultan.Abdella@statkraft.com
• Felix Matt f.n.matt@geo.uio.no
• Francesc Alted faltet@gmail.com

Shyft is released under LGPL V.3 See LICENCE

The documentation below is maintained for the purposes of Shyft development. First time users and those are interested in learning how to use Shyft for hydrologic simulation are strongly encouraged to see Shyft at readthedocs.

Shyft is distributed in three separate code repositories. This repository, shyft provides the main code base. A second repository (required for tests) is located at shyft-data. A third repository shyft-doc is available containing example notebooks and tutorials. The three repositories assume they have been checked out in parallel into a shyft_workspace directory:

mkdir shyft_workspace && cd shyft_workspace
export SHYFT_WORKSPACE=`pwd`
git clone https://github.com/statkraft/shyft.git
git clone https://github.com/statkraft/shyft-data.git
git clone https://github.com/statkraft/shyft-doc.git

For compiling and running Shyft, you will need:

• A C++1y compiler (gcc-7 or higher)
• The BLAS and LAPACK libraries (development packages)
• A Python3 (3.6 or higher) interpreter
• The NumPy package (>= 1.8.0)
• The netCDF4 package (>= 1.2.1)
• The CMake building tool (3.9 or higher)
• 3rd party dependencies for c++ extensions and tests boost, dlib, armadillo, doctest

In addition, a series of Python packages are needed mainly for running the tests. These can be easily installed via:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

or, if you are using conda (see below):

$ cat requirements.txt | xargs conda install

Please refer to our Python Installation Guide

NOTE: the build/compile instructions below have been mainly tested on Linux platforms. Shyft can also be compiled (and it is actively maintained) for Windows, but the building instructions are not covered here (yet).

NOTE: the dependency regarding a modern compiler generally means gcc-7 is required to build Shyft.

You can compile Shyft by using the typical procedure for Python packages.

Shyft currently uses boost, dlib, armadillo and doctest to build the python-extensions.

The dependencies can be provided as pr. standard on your linux-system, or built from source following standard build-recipe from those above mentioned libraries.

We supply scripts to automate the build-from source strategy:

shyft/build_support/build_dependencies.sh (linux) shyft/build_support/win_build_dependencies.sh (windows)

You should execute the build_dependencies.sh script just after initial checkout or refresh, prior to building the python extensions. The scripts will download and build required packages in shyft_dependencies directory in parallel with shyft directory.

The linux build will also download miniconda with required packages for the shyft_env in parallel with the shyft directory, effectively giving a complete sandboxed shyft development setup.

You should then prepend to miniconda/bin to PATH prior to working with shyft to ensure that the correct python interpreter is picked up.

When you call setup.py the script will call cmake. If the dependencies exist in the aforementioned directory, they will be used. Otherwise cmake will attempt to locate the libraries from the system.

pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py build_ext --inplace 

NOTE: If you haven't set env_vars as part of your conda environment, then you need to do the following:

# assumes you are still in the shyft_workspace directory containing
# the git repositories
bash shyft/build_support/build_dependencies.sh
export PATH=$SHYFT_WORKSPACE/miniconda/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$SHYFT_WORKSPACE/shyft_dependencies/lib
cd shyft #the shyft repository
python setup.py build_ext --inplace

It is recommended to at least run a few of the tests after building. This will ensure your paths and environment variables are set correctly.

The quickest and easiest test to run is:

python -c "from shyft import api"

To run further tests, see the TESTING section below.

If the tests above run, then you can simply install Shyft using:

cd $SHYFT_WORKSPACE/shyft
python setup.py install

Now, you should be set to start working with the shyft documentation and ideally clone the shyft-doc repositories to work through the notebooks and learning Shyft!

Although (at least on Linux) the setup.py method above uses the CMake building tool behind the scenes, you can also compile it manually (in fact, if you plan to develop Shyft, this may be recommended because you will be able to run the integrated C++ tests). The steps are the usual ones:

$ cd $SHYFT_WORKSPACE/shyft
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ cmake ..      # configuration step; or "ccmake .." for curses interface
$ make -j 4     # do the actual compilation of C++ sources (using 4 processes)
$ make install  # install python extensions into the shyft python source tree

We have the beast compiled by now. For testing:

$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$SHYFT_WORKSPACE/shyft_dependencies/lib
$ make test     # run the C++ tests
$ export PYTHONPATH=$SHYFT_WORKSPACE/shyft
$ nosetests ..  # run the Python tests

If all the tests pass, then you have an instance of Shyft that is fully functional. In case this directory is going to act as a long-term installation it is recommended to persist your $LD_LIBRARY_PATH and $PYTHONPATH environment variables (in ~/.bashrc or using the conda env_vars described above).

The way to test Shyft is by running:

$ nosetests

from the root shyft repository directory.

The test suite is comprehensive, and in addition to unit-tests covering c++ parts and python parts, it also covers integration tests with netcdf and geo-services.

Shyft tests are meant to be run from the sources directory. As a start, you can run the python api test suite by:

cd $SHYFT_WORKSPACE/shyft/shyft/tests/api
nosetests

To conduct further testing and to run direct C++ tests, you need to be sure you have the shyft-data repository as a sibling of the shyft repository directory.

To run some of the C++ core tests you can try the following:

cd $SHYFT_WORKSPACE/shyft/build/test
make test