Installation

The below will help you quickly install Firefly so you can create your own Firefly visualization.

Note

Viewing an existing Firefly instance requires no installation. Simply navigate to the visualization web address with a modern web browser.

Requirements

You will need a working Python installation; we recommend installing Anaconda Python version 3.x. You will also need to install the following packages:

  • numpy

  • h5py

  • pandas

  • eventlet

  • flask

  • flask-socketio

  • requests

Installing the latest stable release

Install the latest stable release with

pip install firefly

This is the preferred way to install Firefly as it will automatically install the necessary requirements and put Firefly into your ${PYTHONPATH} environment variable so you can import it.

Install from source

Alternatively, you can install the latest version directly from the most up-to-date version of the source-code by cloning/forking the GitHub repository

git clone https://github.com/ageller/Firefly.git

Once you have the source, you can build Firefly (and add it to your environment) by executing

python setup.py install

or

pip install -e .

in the top level directory. The required Python packages will automatically be installed as well.

You can test your installation by looking for the firefly executable built by the installation

which firefly

and by importing the Firefly Python frontend in Python

import firefly