LIGO Follow-up Advocate Tools

This package provides tools for LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA follow-up advocates to assist in tasks such as drafting astronomical bulletins for gravitational-wave detections.

To install

The easiest way to install ligo-followup-advocate, is with pip:

pip install --user ligo-followup-advocate

To upgrade

Once you have installed the package, to check for and install updates, run the following command:

pip install --user --upgrade ligo-followup-advocate

Current templates

If you wish to just see examples of the current templates or submit these to be reviewed in P&P, you can find them here.

Example

ligo-followup-advocate provides a single command to draft a GCN Circular skeleton. Pass it the authors and the GraceDB ID as follows:

ligo-followup-advocate compose \
    'A. Einstein (IAS)' 'S. Hawking (Cambridge)' \
    'I. Newton (Cambridge)' 'Data (Starfleet)' \
    'S190407w'

Optionally, you can have the program open the draft in your default mail client by passing it the --mailto option.

For a list of other supported commands, run:

ligo-followup-advocate --help

For further options for composing circulars, run:

ligo-followup-advocate compose --help

You can also invoke most functions directly from a Python interpreter, like this:

>>> from ligo import followup_advocate
>>> text = followup_advocate.compose('S190407w')

To develop

To participate in development, clone the git repository:

git clone git@git.ligo.org:emfollow/ligo-followup-advocate.git

To release

The project is set up so that releases are automatically uploaded to PyPI whenever a tag is created. Use the following steps to issue a release. In the example below, we are assuming that the current version is 0.0.5, and that we are releasing version 0.0.6.

Check the latest pipeline status to make sure that the master branch builds without any errors.
(Optional) Download the .tar.gz file from the sdist job, unzip the file, and check that pytests are passing for it. This ensures that tests will also run successfully on conda-forge.
```
cd ~/Downloads/ligo_followup_advocate-X-X-X
pytest --cov=ligo.followup_advocate --cov-report=term --import-mode=importlib
```
Before making any changes, switch to the master branch and incorporate the changes going into this release:
```
git fetch upstream
git checkout master
git rebase upstream/master
```
Make sure that all significant changes since the last release are documented in CHANGES.md. If missing, make additional entries.
Update the heading for the current release in CHANGES.md from 0.0.6 (unreleased) to 0.0.6 (YYYY-MM-DD) where YYYY-MM-DD is today's date. Also update the version in pyproject.toml similarly. Save both files once done.
Update the PDF templates with this new version.
Check these files were changed and saved properly
```
git status
```

Commit those changes:

git commit -a -m "Update changelog for version 0.0.6"

Tag the release:
```
git tag v0.0.6 -m "Version 0.0.6"
```
Add a new section to CHANGES.md like this:
```
## 0.0.7 (unreleased)

-   No changes yet.
```
You can also consider updating the version in pyproject.toml and template.tex as was done above in preparation for the next release.
Commit the changes:
```
git commit -a -m "Back to development"
```

Check that the changes worked correctly:

git log

You should see the top three commits look like the following:

commit fc5b54cfb926f3e0265fd10e0501e3b403e7d88c (HEAD -> master)
Author: Brandon Piotrzkowski <brandon.piotrzkowski@ligo.org>
Date:   Mon Jun 23 11:18:49 2025 -0400

    Back to development

commit 14c43f49022f51d5c72309dc7306171953011516 (tag: v0.0.6)
Author: Brandon Piotrzkowski <brandon.piotrzkowski@ligo.org>
Date:   Mon Jun 23 11:17:24 2025 -0400

    Update changelog for version 0.0.6

commit d0e9075484992e75b4d1aa4dba02a962b990b84c (upstream/master)
Author: Deep Chatterjee <deep.chatterjee@ligo.org>
Date:   Wed Jun 18 20:02:00 2025 +0000

    add cgmi information, update skymap filename for aframe events; fix #158

You should see upstream/master for the third commit, the the correct tag name in the second commit, and the top commit coming after both.

If these two new commits look good, push everything to GitLab:
```
git push upstream && git push upstream --tags
```
Within a few minutes, the new package will be built and uploaded to PyPI.
If the changes of this release significantly impact the text of the example templates, upload the PDF of templates created from the publish CI job to DCC. Initiate P&P review and address comments in a new release. Note that it may take multiple releases to get P&P approval.
Once P&P approval has been given, create an SCCB ticket. Note that there is an option to do this via the a button in the CI/CD pipeline, but this template could be outdated. The recommendation is to create the ticket by hand via the above link.
Once the SCCB ticket has been created, created a merge request to update this version in gwcelery if this has not already been done. You can check the current version used via the poetry.lock file. This will involve using poetry, so having this installed and being familiar with the commands will be needed.

Release files for ligo-followup-advocate 2.1.0

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for ligo-followup-advocate 2.1.0
File	Size	Uploaded
ligo_followup_advocate-2.1.0.tar.gz	13.4 MB	Aug 31, 2026	Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for ligo-followup-advocate 2.1.0
File	Interpreter	ABI	Platform	Reset
ligo_followup_advocate-2.1.0-py3-none-any.whl 13.5 MB Aug 31, 2026	Python 3	none	any	Details

Total release size: 26.9 MB

Release files / ligo_followup_advocate-2.1.0.tar.gz

Download URL	ligo_followup_advocate-2.1.0.tar.gz
Size	13.4 MB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`65c4745a8403d2b625636161c834f683995fd7c2ab044eb7c9a0053fee3b10d6`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`4679d2a20542db463017f7bb633f4dd7c3bb8992228a57bf556d3c99b93760c3`
Upload date	Aug 31, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.14.7`

Release files / ligo_followup_advocate-2.1.0-py3-none-any.whl

Download URL	ligo_followup_advocate-2.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
Size	13.5 MB
Tags	Python 3
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`02632a1a93f571432066b4602d60551eb48eaa0c8332fb737b1ef3af9590929b`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`203230fe16e7ef432e09a678ada5f88f7e9739d3164a33e48833e9e7c5e0f708`
Upload date	Aug 31, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	No
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.14.7`