Installation¶

Installing BAL Toolbox is intended to be a simple process, requiring only basic understanding of ArcGIS toolbox operations. It has been installed and tested on ArcGIS 10.2.

Unzipping the toolbox¶

The software package is delivered as a compressed zip file. Unzip the toolbox into a location on your computer, for example C:\bal. Then you will have stored all the files at folder C:\bal.

Dependencies¶

Warning

ArcGIS 10.2 is packaged with a modified version of Numpy. In our experience, attempting to update the Numpy package will cause the arcpy package to fail catastrophically, and usually without reporting any error message. We strongly recommend against trying to upgrade the version of Numpy linked to your ArcGIS installation.

Setting the environment¶

To enable the BAL toolbox to run flawlessly, you may need to change some environment settings. The important variable to set is the PYTHONPATH variable. This should be set to the path where you have extracted the contents of the zip file. A complete discussion on environment variables in Python is given in the Python documentation.

Windows¶

The Python documentation contains some simple instructions for setting environment variables on Windows systems here. See this link for setting the variables on different Windows systems.

Testing the installation¶

The code includes a suite of unit tests that ensure elements of the code base work as expected. The code should be tested before running the toolbox. Users will need to install the Nose package to run these tests.

The test suite can be run from the main directory. On Windows, run the run_test_all.cmd script from the main BAL directory.

If the test suite fails, there will be a message indicating which test failed and a description of the failure. If you receive this, copy the description and create a ticket on the Bushfire Attack Level Toolbox Issue Tracker.