We recommend the use of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) to install PyBaMM, see the instructions below to get PyBaMM working using Windows, WSL and VSCode.
Contents
Follow the instructions from Microsoft here. When given the option, choose the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distribution to install. Don’t forget to initialise the Ubuntu installation using the instructions given here.
Open a terminal window in your installed Ubuntu distribution by selecting “Ubuntu” from the start menu. This should give you a bash prompt in your home directory.
To download the PyBaMM source code, you first need to install git, which you can do by typing
sudo apt install git-core
For easier integration with WSL, we recommend that you install PyBaMM in your Windows Documents folder, for example by first navigating to
$ cd /mnt/c/Users/USER_NAME/Documents
where USER_NAME is your username. Exact path to Windows documents may vary. Now use git to clone the PyBaMM repository:
git clone https://github.com/pybamm-team/PyBaMM.git
This will create a new directly called PyBaMM, you can move to this
directory in bash using the cd command:
cd PyBaMM
If you are unfamiliar with the linux command line, you might find it useful to work through this tutorial provided by Ubuntu.
Now head over and follow the installation instructions for PyBaMM for linux here.
You will probably want to use a native Windows IDE such as Visual Studio Code or the full Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. Both of these packages can connect to WSL so that you can write python code in a native windows environment, while at the same time using WSL to run the code using your installed Ubuntu distribution. The following instructions assume that you are using Visual Studio Code.
First, setup VSCode to run within the PyBaMM directory that you
created above, using the instructions provided
here.
Once you have opened the PyBaMM folder in vscode, use the
Extensions panel to install the Python extension from Microsoft.
Note that extensions are either installed on the Windows (Local) or on
in WSL (WSL:Ubuntu), so even if you have used VSCode previously with the
Python extension, you probably haven’t installed it in WSL. Make sure to
reload after installing the Python extension so that it is available.
If you have installed PyBaMM into the virtual environment env as in
the PyBaMM linux install guide, then VSCode should automatically start
using this environment and you should see something similar to “Python
3.6.8 64-bit (‘env’: venv)” in the bottom bar.
To test that vscode can run a PyBaMM script, navigate to the
examples/scripts folder and right click on the create-model.py
script. Select “Run current file in Python Interactive Window”. This
should run the script, which sets up and solves a model of SEI thickness
using PyBaMM. You should see a plot of SEI thickness versus time pop up
in the interactive window.
The Python Interactive Window in VSCode can be used to view plots, but is restricted in functionality and cannot, for example, launch separate windows to show plot. To setup an xserver on windows and use this to launch windows for plotting, follow these instructions:
echo "export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0" >> ~/.bashrcsudo apt-get install python3-tkecho "backend : TKAgg" >> ~/.config/matplotlib/matplotlibrc