[Installation] installing hnn-core inside a virtual environment

[elifkoksal]

Describe the problem to us.

Hello,

I am trying to install/run hnn-core by following the installation steps without conda.

I created an virtual environment (as usual), I verified that Xcode is installed. I activated the venv, and typed $ pip install "hnn_core[gui,parallel]". I didn't get any error messages during the installation. However, when I run hnn-gui command in the terminal, it doesn't start a new tab in my browser and it gives "can't open DISPLAY" as an error. I also tried $ import hnn_core (or any other packages installed with hnn_core), but got only "can't open DISPLAY"

I tried to follow the basic installation after following the same steps above. But $ python -c "import hnn_core" still fails.

Did anybody come across to such an error while installing hnn without conda? I run on Python 3.9.6 on Mac M4.

Thanks.

What steps did you follow to install?

-> create an virtual env
-> activate the virtual env
-> $ pip install "hnn_core[gui]" (or $ pip install hnn_core)

Error message

can't open DISPLAY

OS

Mac

[asoplata]

Hello Elif,

Thanks again for coming to our workshop!

I am going to try to recreate your issue today, but first, since you didn't use Anaconda, but you have a newer mac (M4), how exactly did you install Python? (e.g. *homebrew, an installer from the Python website, etc.)? I believe I have the same laptop as you so I'm confident I will be able to help you solve your issue.

[asoplata]

I will add that the can't open DISPLAY is expected and is just a warning that can be safely ignored.

[asoplata]

Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the error. I have a low-confidence suspicion that the problem may lie with your Python install or paths, not HNN itself. I tried the following:

1. Installing the latest version of Xcode Command Line Tools: 16.3.0.0.1.1742442376 (this can be found by running the following command: pkgutil --pkg-info=com.apple.pkg.CLTools_Executables.
2. Purging Anaconda from my system entirely.
3. Uninstalling Homebrew's version of Python via the following command brew uninstall --ignore-dependencies python (WARNING: this will break Homebrew packages that depend on it!). @elifkoksal If you also have python installed via Homebrew unintentionally, this could possibly be a cause of your issues.
4. Installing Python 3.9.6 exactly from https://www.python.org/downloads/macos/ via the universal2 installer
5. Restarting my computer (make sure you do this! just to be safe)
6. Creating a venv using python3 -m venv test-elif-venv then activating it
7. Running pip install "hnn_core[gui,parallel]", which installed successfully
8. Successfully running both python -c 'import hnn_core' and hnn-gui. I still got the Warning: no DISPLAY environment variable. --No graphics will be displayed. output, but this can be safely ignored.

I don't think I can debug this any further without looking at more information from your system. If we reach an impasse, then I am happy to have a Zoom with you next week where we can try to investigate the issue: feel free to contact me at my email (in my Github user profile) if you want to do this.