SAPPHiRE is a Simulation and Analysis Program Package for HiSPARC Research and Education. It was created in the process of completing the PhD research of David Fokkema. The history of this repository contains the complete simulation, analysis and plot generation code that formed the basis for David's thesis. Arne de Laat took over development of SAPPHiRE while working on his own PhD research.

This repository is created with a sole purpose in mind: to enable HiSPARC students, teachers and researchers to easily gain access to the data and perform common simulation and analysis tasks. Historically, starting work on the data, or extending an existing analysis code, has involved elaborate installation instructions, heavy customizations to the software, countless hours going over opaque parts of code and a general feeling of anguish and despair. SAPPHiRE's ultimate goal: no more of that.

Required: Python with pip, the HDF5 and ATLAS libraries and a Fortran compiler.

Then, using pip, simply open a Terminal and do:

$ pip install hisparc-sapphire

This should install sapphire with all requirements. More extensive installation instructions are available in the documentation in the doc/ directory. You can compile them using Sphinx, or you can follow this link: http://docs.hisparc.nl/sapphire/.

To check if it worked start Python and load the package:

import sapphire

You're done!

Important: First check if the last commit passes the tests on Travis CI!

To release a new version modify the version number in setup.py. Then create a commit for the new release with a title like 'Bump version to vX.Y.Z' and a message that contains a summary of the most important changes since the last release. Then tag the commit and push it to GitHub:

$ git tag vX.Y.Z
$ git push --tags

Then upload the new version to PyPI (this requires the wheel package):

$ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel upload

The latest version is then available from PyPI.