Python Vortex Lattice solver (PyVL)

The aim of this project is to provide a vortex lattice solver, which can handle all kinds of open and closed meshes. It aims to be highly performant on a single machine and allow for easy adaptation to different specific applications.

TODO:

• add a cool image
• link wiki/pages

Table of Contents:

• Installation from Source
• Contributing

Installation from Source

This section describes how to install the package from source. This includes instructions on how to get a user version, as well as how to install the package for development.

Dependencies

The first step is installing the dependencies. In order to be able to build the package, you will need:

• CMake,
• Your system's C compiler (on Linux it's gcc and on Windows it is msvc),
• Support for OpenMP 3.0 (msvc will use llvm to support it),
• Python 3.10 or newer.

Installing the Package

To install the PyVL package in the active Python environment. Assuming that you cloned the repository to the directory pyvl, simply use pip like so:

python -m pip install pyvl

This will build the package and install it.

Development Version

If you instead want to work on the package, you can specify dev and/or docs as optional dependencies for the package. You also probably want to then install the package as editable:

python -m pip install -e pyvl[dev,docs]

Contributing

This section outlines guidelines on how to contribute to the project. While all of these steps are not necessary, they makes other peoples' lives easier. These steps are all assuming you have installed the development version of the package.

Using pre-commit

This package uses pre-commit in order to run git hooks prior to allowing you to make a commit. These include Python type checking, C and Python formatting, and spellchecking.

After you clone the repository, you must then initialize these by running the following command in your development environment:

pre-commit install

Note that this needs to be done only once pre commit.

Running Tests

There are three groups of test which are included in the package:

• C tests, which check the low-level mathematical functions (stored in sub-directories of test directory).
• Python tests, which check the rest of the module, from the C types, to the pure Python code (stored in test/pytests).
• Python doctests, which are in the docstrings of the Python types/functions. These are in docstrings of more important types in the python/pyvl directory.

The Python tests can be run automatically by calling pytest. To run C tests, you can use CMake.

Building the Documentation

Documentation for pyvl is written with Sphinx. As such, you can build it by going to the doc directory, then executing make html, which should work both on Linux and Windows.

Using nox

To automatically test building, code tests, and building the documentation in clean environment, nox can be used. To display the list of available nox sessions:

nox --list

If you just want to run all the default sessions, you can also just run:

nox