Launching ACP

The ACP server can be started with launch_acp:

import ansys.acp.core as pyacp

acp = pyacp.launch_acp()

Basic Usage

Once the server is running, we can start working with PyACP. For example, to load an ACP Model from an existing file:

>>> remote_path = acp.upload_file(local_path="<MODEL_PATH>")
>>> model = acp.import_model(path=remote_path)
>>> model.name
'ACP Model'

Installation

Installing PyACP in developer mode allows you to modify the source and enhance it. Before contributing to the project, please refer to the PyAnsys Developer’s guide.

You will need to follow these steps:

1. Start by cloning this repository, and entering the newly created directory:

   git clone https://github.com/ansys/pyacp
   cd pyacp

2. Make sure you have the latest version of uv, using one of the methods described at https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/.

   4. Install the project and all its development dependencies using uv. This also takes care of creating a new virtual environment:

   uv sync --all-groups --all-extras

   This step installs PyACP in an editable mode (no build step is needed, no re-install when changing the code).

5. Activate your development virtual environment with:

   source .venv/bin/activate

   On Windows PowerShell:

   .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1

Testing

The PyACP test suite uses pytest. You can run it with

pytest --license-server=<YOUR_LICENSE_SERVER> tests/unittests

Benchmarking

As part of the test suite, we run some performance benchmarks. These can be run with

pytest --license-server=<YOUR_LICENSE_SERVER> tests/benchmarks

Additional options can be found in the pytest-benchmark documentation.

NOTE: The benchmarks use the tc-netem Linux kernel module to simulate a slow network connection within a Docker container. This is available only on Linux, not on Docker for MacOS or Windows.

The benchmark results from the main branch are uploaded to https://acp.docs.pyansys.com/benchmarks.

Pre-commit hooks

Style and linter checks are run through the pre-commit tool. You can run these checks with

pre-commit run --all-files

We also recommend installing pre-commit into your repository:

pre-commit install

This will run the pre-commit hooks on the changed files before every git commit. If you ever need to create a commit without running the hooks, you can skip them with git commit -n.

Documentation

make -C doc html

cd doc; .\make.bat html

.\doc\create_doc_windows.ps1

Distribution

The following commands can be used to build and check the PyACP package:

uv build
twine check dist/*

This creates both a source distribution, and a wheel file. An alternative is

pip install build
python -m build --wheel