Installation¶

Requirements¶

To install Striptease, you need the following tools:

Python 3.6 or later (required)
A C++ compiler (optional, see below)

Installing the code¶

To build the program, you must have the command git installed and working on your computer.

Creating a new virtual environment¶

You are advised to create a new virtual environment for your work on Striptease; this usually requires the following steps:

python -m venv my_virtual_environment
?ACTIVATE?

where ?ACTIVATE? is some command that depends on the platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) and shell (Bash, Zsh, Fish…) that you are using. For instance, if you are using Bash/Zsh under Mac OS X or Linux, you must run these commands:

python -m venv my_virtual_environment
source my_virtual_environment/bin/activate

If you are running the Command Prompt under Windows, the commands are the following:

python -m venv my_virtual_environment
my_virtual_environment\scripts\activate.bat

Refer to the Python documentation for more details.

Downloading Striptease¶

To install Striptease and its dependencies, use the following commands:

git clone git@github.com:lspestrip/striptease.git
cd striptease
pip install --user -r requirements.txt

Be sure to run your source codes and Jupyter notebooks within the striptease directory, otherwise calibration tables and other important data files won’t be visible.

However, if you need to access the instrument in real-time, you must first set up the authentication system. To learn how to do it, continue reading, otherwise you can stop here.

C++ GUI¶

Striptease included a C++ program used to send long sequence of commands to the Strip electronics. This program is no longer supported, as the script program_batch_runner.py is now the officially-supported way of running automatic scripts.

If you are curious and want to compile it, you must have a C++ compiler and the Qt libraries installed. Run the following commands within the striptease directory:

cd TestRunner
qmake TestRunner.pro && make

Authentication¶

To use the online tools provided by Striptease, you must have an account for the STRIP web portal. (This is not necessary if you just plan to load data from HDF5 files.) Once you are registered, you must use your username and password to authenticate to the portal.

Striptease provides a number of shortcuts to provide your own credentials to the web portal. Here are the possibilities:

Save your credentials in a text file, which is read any time Stripeline needs authentication. This requires some setup, but it’s the best method.
Enter username and password every time. This is boring, but it’s the most secure way to authenticate.
Use environment variables. This is unsecure, but quick to do.

Using credentials from a text file¶

We discuss this method first, because it is the most useful and provides a secure yet permanent way to connect to the server without re-entering your credentials again and again.

You must save your credentials in a JSON file named conf.json and place it in the directory ~/.strip. Here is an example:

{
  "user": "foo",
  "password": "bar"
}

You can create this file from the command line, using the following commands (on Mac OS X and Linux):

$ mkdir -p ~/.strip && cat <<EOF > ~/.strip/conf.json
{
  "user": "foo",
  "password": "bar"
}
EOF

In order to secure your credentials, you should change the permission of the directory .strip:

$ chmod -R go-rwx ~/.strip

Using environment variables¶

A quick method to save your username and password is to use environment variables. Striptease recognizes the variables STRIP_USER and STRIP_PASSWORD, which you can set using the following commands from terminal:

$ export STRIP_USER=foo
$ export STRIP_PASSWORD=bar

These variables will be lost once you close the terminal window. You can make them permanent by adding the two export commands to your ~/.profile file, but you should instead prefer to save them in conf.json (see above), as environment variables can be easily tracked by other malicious users on your system.