Installation

Welcome to alertbase! To get started, you’ll need to install alertbase, get credentials, and get an IndexDB.

Installing the Python Package

Some day™ you’ll be able to install with pip. For now, you’ll need to clone the dang thing. Like this:

# Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/ZwickyTransientFacility/alertbase
cd alertbase

# Install it:
pip install .

That’s it!

Required Credentials

You’ll need AWS credentials to access the alert data. If you’ve been talking to Spencer, that probably means you need creds from him to the Heising-Simons ZTF AWS account.

You’ll then need to install them somewhere that libraries can find them. The Boto library has a guide for that.

The credentials will need GetObject permissions on the bucket that’s storing data.

Getting an IndexDB

Well, there’s no good way to write this documentation yet. You can find a copy on epyc, if you know what that is - there’s one at /astro/users/swnelson/src/alertbase/alerts.db.tar.gz. Copy it wherever you like and untar it. For example:

# Download it
scp epyc.astro.washington.edu:/astro/users/swnelson/src/alertbase/alerts.db.tar.gz alerts.db.tar.gz

# Unpack it
tar -xzvf alerts.db.tar.gz

# The database should be in ./alerts.db now
cat alerts.db/meta.json