Installation¶

Standalone Executable¶

Starting with v0.3, standalone executables are available for windows, linux, and mac. This feature is new and very much in beta. Meant to be a temporary solution for those not needing access to the underlying Nestor API, it will eventually be replaced by more portable, web-app solutions.

Note that nestor-dash and nestor-gui command line scripts will not be installed, and therefore unavailable! Only the interface normally accessible via nestor-gui is bundled as an executable at this time.

At the link above, select a distribution (Linux 5.0 x86_64 or greater, tested on Ubuntu 18.10; Windows 10 or greater; OSx v?? or greater), which downloads a zipped folder containing dependencies and the program itself. Extract the folder to any directory and run the Nestor file to start tagging!

On Windows, you will see a Nestor.exe; on Linux you must ensure the Nestor script file is executable, and can be run in the terminal via ./<path-to-file>/Nestor

Python-based Install¶

If you want to use the Nestor API to access NLP/plotting functions, along with access to the (beta) nestor-dash analysis webtool, you will need to install Nestor as a python library. This will assume a basic level of familiarity with python and terminal usage.

System Requirements¶

The installation can be done using either the automatic pip method (recommended) or by downloading the installation and completing it manually. To install Nestor, your computer must at least have the following configured:

Operating system: Windows 10, Mac OS, or Ubuntu Linux
A working installation of Python 3. If you do not have Python installation, an easy way to install it is using the Anaconda distribution of Python.
The Comma Separated Value (csv) file that contains your raw data must be in UTF-8 encoding to be compatible with the tagging tool. Your computer has tools to help you save your csv as utf-8.
If you decide to use a conda environment (recommended), ensure pip is installed in the environment itself to prevent references to the top-level pip installation

Nestor Installation using PyPI (Recommended)¶

This is the recommended way of installing Nestor since it is minimal. To install,

Open a terminal, and type in pip install nist-nestor. The installation will then proceed automatically and will install the graphical user interface (GUI) for the Nestor Tagging Tool.
Optionally, you can install additional dependencies for the Nestor Dashboard using the [dash] options flag, as: pip install nist-nestor[dash]
The developer releases (unstable!) can be installed directly from the github master branch, if you have git installed: pip install git+https://github.com/usnistgov/nestor.git

Nestor installation using local archive¶

This step is necessary only if you did not install using the above method (using PyPI), or if you wish to edit code locally while still gaining access to the command-line scripts.

Download a .zip file of the entire nestor repository from Github.
Extract the files to a directory, preferably with write access, and navigate a terminal to the folder where the files have been extracted to (the folder will have the file setup.py in it).
Install nestor using the command pip install -e . (note the “.”) ..

(Optional Step) Type in pip install -e .[dash] to install the Nestor Dashboard with dependencies.