Checking The PoPy Installation

Having opened a opened a PoPy terminal, the first screen you see shows the help page for PoPy which lists the available PoPy commands. This help is available at any time by typing

popy

in any terminal (i.e. command prompt or Powershell).

In general, you use PoPy by calling

popy <command> <arguments>

in a PoPy terminal where <command> is an action that applies on its own or to one or more <arguments>.

To verify that PoPy is working, for example, run

popy info

which, if PoPy has installed successfully, will show detailed information on the installation similar to:

INFO - In a PoPy Binary environment
INFO - popy_flavour=binary
INFO - popy_python_path=C:\PoPy\
INFO - popy_release=<X.Y.Z>
INFO - popy_version=academic
INFO - python_version=3.8.6
INFO - windows_version=('10', '10.0.17134', 'SP0', 'Multiprocessor Free')
INFO - machine_name=mickey
INFO - product_key=None
The product is running in trial mode
trial days remaining=3
INFO - should_run=True

(The output above shows information on a brand new installation of PoPy that is in its 60-day trial period and will look different once PoPy has been activated.)

PoPy Validation

Because computers vary in their architecture, it is possible that running the same code and the same script could give different results on different installations.

We therefore bundle a tool, popy validate, that runs PoPy on a suite of examples and compares the results generated locally on your hardware to some reference results generated on the PoPy development team’s hardware. If the results agree sufficiently well then PoPy is ready to use.

These Validation Examples are interesting examples drawn from the DDMoRe repository that cover models with different features, e.g. inter-occasion variability.

To run this suite of tests, simply run

popy validate

from a PoPy terminal.

Some of the examples take a few minutes to run and the full validation can take about 20 minutes on older hardware but you should only need to run the validation once.

If the validation is successful, you should get output on the command line as the validation examples are processed. The end of the output should look like:

INFO - 
INFO - Validation results: 4 passed; 0 failed.
INFO - Passes:
INFO -   ddmore0061
INFO -   ddmore0093
INFO -   ddmore0215
INFO -   ddmore0238
INFO - 

    VALIDATION RESULT: PASS
    
INFO - 
INFO -  time to complete val  = 915.338s
INFO - Main script val completed.
INFO -  time to complete main + sub scripts = 916.993s
Finished: SUCCESS

This output will also be written to the log file validation_script.pyml.run.main.log in the validation subdirectory of your PoPy installation.

This log file can be used as a form of verification for a validation report, if PoPy is to be used in a commercial setting.

Note

If validation fails for any reason, please get in touch with us to diagnose the problem.