Quickstart guide

Overview

Teaching: 2 min
Exercises: 8 min
Compatibility: ESMValTool v2.8.0

Questions

• What is the purpose of the quickstart guide?

• How do I load and check the ESMValTool environment?

• How do I configure ESMValTool?

• How do I run a recipe?

Objectives

• Understand the purpose of the quickstart guide

• Load and check the ESMValTool environment

• Configure ESMValTool

• Run a recipe

What is the purpose of the quickstart guide?

• The purpose of the quickstart guide is to enable a user of ESMValTool to run ESMValTool as quickly as possible by making the bare minimum number of changes.

How do I load and check the ESMValTool environment?

• For this quickstart guide, an assumption is made that ESMValTool has already been installed at the site where ESMValTool will be run. If this is not the case, see the Installation episode in this tutorial.

• Load the ESMValTool environment by following the instructions at ESMValTool: Pre-installed versions on HPC clusters / other servers.

• Check the ESMValTool environment by accessing the help for ESMValTool:

    esmvaltool --help
  

How do I configure ESMValTool?

• Create the ESMValTool user configuration file (the file is written by default to ~/.esmvaltool/config-user.yml):

    esmvaltool config get_config_user
  

• Edit the ESMValTool user configuration file using your favourite text editor to uncomment the lines relating to the site where ESMValTool will be run.

• For more details about the ESMValTool user configuration file see the Configuration episode in this tutorial.

How do I run a recipe?

• Run the example Python recipe:

  esmvaltool run examples/recipe_python.yml 
  

• Wait for the recipe to complete. If the recipe completes successfully, the last line printed to screen at the end of the log will look something like:

   YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:SS, NNN UTC [NNNNN] INFO    Run was successful
  

• View the output of the recipe by opening the HTML file produced by ESMValTool (the location of this file is printed to screen near the end of the log):

  YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:SS, NNN UTC [NNNNN] INFO    Wrote recipe output to:
  file:///$HOME/esmvaltool_output/recipe_python_<date>_<time>/index.html
  

• For more details about running recipes see the Running your first recipe episode in this tutorial.

Key Points

• The purpose of the quickstart guide is to enable a user of ESMValTool to run ESMValTool as quickly as possible without having to go through the whole tutorial

• Use the module load command to load the ESMValTool environment, see the [Installation][lesson-installation] episode for more details and use esmvaltool --help to check the ESMValTool environment

• Use esmvaltool config get_config_user to create the ESMValTool user configuration file

• Use esmvaltool run <recipe>.yml to run a recipe