About the Software

pwkit is a collection of Peter Williams’ miscellaneous Python tools. I’m packaging them so that other people can install them off of PyPI or Conda and run my code without having to go to too much work. That’s the hope, at least.

Installation

The most recent stable version of pwkit is available on the Python package index, so you should be able to install this package simply by running pip install pwkit. The package is also available in the conda package manager by installing it from anaconda.org. If you are using packages from the conda-forge project, install with conda install -c pkgw-forge pwkit. Otherwise, use conda install -c pkgw pwkit.

If you want to download the source code and install pwkit manually, the package uses the standard Python setuptools, so running python setup.py install will do the trick.

Some pwkit functionality requires additional Python modules such as scipy; these issues should be very obvious as they manifest as ImportErrors triggered for the relevant modules. Bare minimum functionality requires:

If you install pwkit through standard means, these modules should be automatically installed too if they weren’t already available.

Citation

If you use pwkit in academic work, you should identify that you have done so and specify the version used. While pwkit does not (yet?) have an accompanying formal publication, in journals like ApJ you can “cite” the code directly via its record in the NASA Astrophysics Data System, which has identifier 2017ascl.soft04001W. This corresponds to record ascl:1704.001 in in the Astrophysics Source Code Library. By clicking on this link you can get the ADS-recommended BibTeX record for the reference.

If you are using aastex version 6 or higher, the appropriate code to include after your Acknowledgments section would be:

\software{..., pwkit \citep{2017ascl.soft04001W}, ...}

Authors

pwkit is authored by Peter K. G. Williams and collaborators. Despite this package being named after me, contributions are welcome and will be given full credit. I just don’t want to have to make up a decent name for this package right now.

Contributions have come from (alphabetically by surname):