LOFAR VLBI pipeline

The Low-Frequency Array Very Long Baseline Interferometry (LOFAR-VLBI) pipeline is a calibration and imaging pipeline that includes all of LOFAR’s international stations. This is an implementation of the LOFAR-VLBI pipeline in the Common Workflow Language, which will eventually replace the Genericpipeline implementation.

Instruction on setting up, configuration and usage of the pipeline can be found in the dedicated wiki.

Installing the pipeline

The simplest way to get set up is to install the package in a virtual environment, e.g. by running the following from the repository root directory:

python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install .

Running the test suite

The pipeline comes with a test suite. This suite can be run from the command line by installing the testing dependencies. It is recommended to do this from a virtual environment:

python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install .[test]

The LOFAR VLBI pipeline uses tox to run its testing suite, which is available in the virtual environment and can be run from the project root directory. By default, tox tests against Python versions 3.9 through 3.13 (if available). To test against a specific version, run tox with the -e flag. For example, to test against Python 3.10, run

tox -e py310

The testing suite can also be run using pytest. In this case, the variable VLBI_ROOT_DIR must be set to the project root directory and PYTHONPATH must include the project's scripts directory. For example, if run from the project root directory:

VLBI_ROOT_DIR=$PWD PYTHONPATH=$PWD/scripts pytest