An application to define, manage, and execute various energy system simulation models.

• Python 3.6
• Python 3.7

Please note that Python 3.8 is not supported yet.

Spine Toolbox is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) license. All accompanying documentation, original graphics and other material are released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license. Licenses of all packages used by Spine Toolbox are listed in the Spine Toolbox User Guide.

Installing requires you to clone or download the latest version of the source code to your computer.

The development happens on the dev branch and all the latest features and bug fixes will be added there first. The master branch contains the most stable version of the application.

The recommended way to install and run Spine Toolbox is by using Anaconda or Miniconda environments.

Step-by-step instructions:

1. Install either anaconda or miniconda

2. Open Anaconda prompt

3. Install git into the base environment

    conda install -c anaconda git
   

4. Create a new environment by typing

    conda create -n spinetoolbox python=3.7
   

5. Activate the new environment

    conda activate spinetoolbox
   

6. Clone either the master or dev branch from Spine Toolbox repository on GitHub onto your computer.

7. cd to Spine Toolbox root directory (the one with requirements.txt)

8. Install requirements using pip

    pip install -r requirements.txt
   

9. Run

    python -m spinetoolbox
   

Optionally, you can also install Spine Toolbox on a Python without using Anaconda or Miniconda. If you run into problems by following the instructions here, please see Troubleshooting section below.

Step-by-step instructions:

1. Clone either the master or dev branch onto your computer

2. Install either Python 3.6 or Python 3.7

3. Install requirements

    pip install -r requirements.txt
   

4. Run

    python -m spinetoolbox
   

Remember to update your clone occasionally with the git pull command.

Release versions of Spine Toolbox can be found here. (only available for 64-bit Windows for now). Download the latest version, install and run spinetoolbox.exe.

Python 3.6 or Python 3.7 is required.

See file setup.py and requirements.txt for packages required to run Spinetoolbox.

Additional packages needed for development are listed in dev-requirements.txt. To install the development requirements, run:

pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

To upgrade all required packages for Spine Toolbox, run

pip install --upgrade -r requirements.txt

You may want to do this occasionally if it has been a long time (i.e. several months) since you first installed the requirements.

The developer requirements can be updated similarly by running

pip install --upgrade -r dev-requirements.txt

The requirements include two packages (spinedb_api and spine_engine) developed by the Spine project consortium. Since they are developed very actively at the moment, you may need to upgrade these regularly.

The package spinedb_api is required for running Spine Toolbox. Whenever you merge the latest changes from the remote server onto your local copy of the application (i.e. do a git pull), the application may request you to upgrade this package. You can either do this manually or by running an upgrade script, which has been added for convenience.

To upgrade with a script, run upgrade_spinedb_api.bat on Windows or upgrade_spinedb_api.py on Linux and Mac OS X. The scripts are located in the bin directory.

To upgrade manually, run

pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/Spine-project/Spine-Database-API.git

Package spine_engine is required for running Spine Toolbox. The application may request you to upgrade this package. You can either do this manually or by running an upgrade script, which has been added for convenience.

To upgrade with a script, run upgrade_spine_engine.bat on Windows or upgrade_spinedb_api.py on Linux and Mac OS X. The scripts are located in the bin directory.

To upgrade spine_engine manually, run

pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/Spine-project/spine-engine.git#egg=spine_engine

Note: You don't need to clone or download the spinedb_api nor the spine_engine source codes. pip takes care of installing the latest version from GitHub to your system automatically.

Source files for the User Guide can be found in docs/source directory. In order to build the HTML docs, you need to install the optional requirements (see section 'Installing requirements' above). This installs Sphinx (among other things), which is required in building the documentation. When Sphinx is installed, you can build the HTML pages from the user guide source files by using the bin/build_doc.bat script on Windows or the bin/build_doc.sh script on Linux and Mac. After running the script, the index page can be found in docs/build/html/index.html. The User Guide can also be opened from Spine Toolbox menu Help->User Guide (F2).

Please make sure you are using Python 3.6 or Python 3.7 to install the requirements.

If Python runs into errors while installing on Linux systems, running the following commands in a terminal may help:

sudo apt install libpq-dev
sudo apt-get install unixodbc-dev

If there are problems in starting Spine Toolbox, the chances are that the required packages were not installed successfully. In case this happens, the first thing you should check is that you don't have Qt, PyQt4, PyQt5, PySide, and PySide2 packages installed in the same environment. These do not play nice together and may introduce conflicts. In addition, make sure that you do not have multiple versions of these Qt related packages installed in the same environment. The easiest way to solve this problem is to create a blank (e.g. virtual environment) Python environment just for PySide2 applications and installing the requirements again.

Warning: Using the conda-forge channel for installing the requirements is not recommended.

The required qtconsole package from the conda-forge channel also installs qt and PyQt packages. Since this is a PySide2 application, those are not needed and there is a chance of conflicts between the packages.

Note: Spine Toolbox does not support PySide2 5.12 version (yet).

All are welcome to contribute!

See detailed instructions for contribution in Spine Toolbox User Guide.

Below are the bare minimum things you need to know.

1. Install the developer requirements.
2. Optionally, run pre-commit install in project's root directory. This sets up some git hooks.

• Black is used for Python code formatting. The project's GitHub page includes instructions on how to integrate Black in IDEs.
• Google style docstrings

It is advisable to run pylint regularly on files that have been changed. The project root includes a configuration file for pylint. pylint's user guide includes instructions on how to integrate the tool in IDEs.

Unit tests are located in the tests directory. You can run the entire test suite from project root by

python -m unittest

If you think you have found a bug, please check the following before creating a new issue:

1. Make sure you’re on the latest version.
2. Try older versions.
3. Try upgrading/downgrading the dependencies
4. Search the project’s bug/issue tracker to make sure it’s not a known issue.

What to put in your bug report:

1. Python version. What version of the Python interpreter are you using? 32-bit or 64-bit?
2. OS. What operating system are you on?
3. Application Version. Which version or versions of the software are you using? If you have forked the project from Git, which branch and which commit? Otherwise, supply the application version number (Help->About menu).
4. How to recreate. How can the developers recreate the bug? A screenshot demonstrating the bug is usually the most helpful thing you can report. Relevant output from the Event Log and debug messages from the console of your run, should also be included.

The developers of Spine Toolbox are happy to hear new ideas for features or improvements to existing functionality. The format for requesting new features is free. Just fill out the required fields on the issue tracker and give a description of the new feature. A picture accompanying the description is a good way to get your idea into development faster. But before you make a new issue, please check that there isn't a related idea already open in the issue tracker.