The Pipeline for the International LOFAR Telscope (PILOT) is a calibration and imaging pipeline that includes all of LOFAR’s international stations to achieve sub-arcsecond resolution. It is implemented in Common Workflow Language and we recommend the use of Toil for running it.
Instruction on setting up, configuration and usage of the pipeline can be found in the dedicated wiki.
The simplest way to get set up is to install the package in a virtual environment, e.g. by running the following from the repository root directory:
python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install .
PILOT comes with a test suite, which is controlled through tox.
Tox controls any dependencies, so running the tests is as simple as running tox from anywhere in the project directory after installing PILOT.
By default, tox tests against Python versions 3.10 through 3.13 (if available).
To test against a specific version, run tox with the -e flag.
For example, to test against Python 3.10, run
tox -e py310
The testing suite for the Python scripts can also be run using pytest.
In this case, the variable VLBI_ROOT_DIR must be set to the project root directory and PYTHONPATH must include the project's scripts directory.
For example, if run from the project root directory:
VLBI_ROOT_DIR=$PWD PYTHONPATH=$PWD/scripts pytest
The CWL steps and workflows are validated using cwltool.
Additional command line arguments which are relevant for cwltool's validation can be specified by separating them from tox' arguments with a --, e.g.
tox -e py313 -- --singularity --strict