Installation

ASLDRO can be installed as a module directly from the python package index. Once installed it can simply be run as a command-line tool. For more information how to use a python package in this way please see https://docs.python.org/3/installing/index.html

Python Version

We recommend using the latest version of Python. ASL DRO supports Python 3.7 and newer.

Dependencies

These distributions will be installed automatically when installing ASL DRO.

  • nibabel provides read / write access to some common neuroimaging file formats

  • numpy provides efficient calculations with arrays and matrices

  • jsonschema provides an implementation of JSON Schema validation for Python

  • nilearn provides image manipulation tools and statistical learning for neuroimaging data

Virtual environments

Use a virtual environment to manage the dependencies for your project, both in development and in production.

What problem does a virtual environment solve? The more Python projects you have, the more likely it is that you need to work with different versions of Python libraries, or even Python itself. Newer versions of libraries for one project can break compatibility in another project.

Virtual environments are independent groups of Python libraries, one for each project. Packages installed for one project will not affect other projects or the operating system’s packages.

Python comes bundled with the venv module to create virtual environments.

Create an environment

Create a project folder and a venv folder within:

$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ python3 -m venv venv

On Windows:

$ py -3 -m venv venv

Activate the environment

Before you work on your project, activate the corresponding environment:

$ . venv/bin/activate

On Windows:

> venv\Scripts\activate

Your shell prompt will change to show the name of the activated environment.

Install ASL DRO

Within the activated environment, use the following command to install ASL DRO:

$ pip install asldro

ASL DRO is now installed. Check out the Quickstart or go to the Documentation Overview.