Installations

If you haven't already installed Julia, first order of business is to get that set up.

Installing Julia

1. Install Julia. You can find a link to the appropriate installer at

https://julialang.org/downloads/.

1. Check to make sure you can run Julia from the command line.

Open up a Terminal/Command Prompt and type julia and press Enter. If this results in an error instead of the Julia interpreter, there may be a PATH issue. You can find official instructions on how to add Julia to your PATH at this page. (N.B. If you are using Windows, the full path you should be adding to your path should look something like this: C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Programs\Julia\Julia-[version]\bin.)

1. Install a code editor. For development in Julia, we recommend Juno,

which requires the installation of Atom. You can find instructions on the steps to install Juno here.

1. Check that you can run the Julia REPL in Atom. Open Atom and then

click Juno > Open REPL. If you see an error, you may need to navigate to Juno > Settings and change the Julia Path to the appropriate location. This should allow you start the Julia interpreter from the REPL.

Setting up the GerryChain environment

We highly recommend you use a virtual environment for development in your projects. Virtual Environments can be easily set up using Julia's builtin package manager Pkg.

1. Type julia into your command line to start the julia interpreter.
2. Type using Pkg; Pkg.activate("NameOfEnvironment"; shared=true) .

This creates a virtual environment with the name NameOfEnvironment (you should pick a snazzier name!).

1. Type Pkg.add("GerryChain"). After the package has been installed you can

exit out of the interpreter by typing exit(). You have successfully installed GerryChain in your virtual environment!

1. Optional: If you want to code on Jupyter Notebook, also type in

Pkg.add("IJulia") on the julia console. Next time you do jupyter notebook, you will see an option under the New tab to start a Julia notebook.

1. When you run a script or want to use GerryChain through Jupyter notebooks,

you will want to start your script/notebook with

using Pkg; Pkg.activate("NameOfEnvironment"; shared=true)
using GerryChain

You are all set to go!