pychimera 0.1.5

Use UCSF Chimera Python API in a standard Python 2.7 interpreter.

Use UCSF Chimera packages in any Python 2.7 interpreter

With PyChimera you can…

• Run scripts depending on chimera from CLI with either pychimera or python -m chimera. This includes modules (-m flag) and strings (-c flag).

• Enable import chimera in interactive coding sessions (console, ipython) outside Chimera.

• Use Jupyter Notebooks with Chimera. Import and call enable_chimera() once you have loaded the injected notebook with pychimera notebook.

• Launch a standard Chimera instance, with the benefit of importing all your conda or virtualenv packages with pychimera --gui.

I hope it’s useful! Feedback is appreciated!

Installation

First, if you haven’t already, install latest UCSF Chimera.

Then, install PyChimera via pip, conda or setup.py:

pip install pychimera
conda install -c insilichem pychimera
git clone https://github.com/insilichem/pychimera.git && python pychimera/setup.py install

Usage

Run pychimera -h for quick help.

To start an interactive Python session:

pychimera                  # standalone
pychimera -i some_file.py  # with some file
pychimera -im module       # with a Python module
pychimera -ic "string"     # with a command
pychimera ipython          # launch IPython interpreter
pychimera notebook         # launch IPython notebook

To launch a module that uses Chimera internally:

pychimera -m this

To execute any Python statement:

pychimera -c 'import chimera'

To execute a script:

pychimera script.py

To launch Chimera GUI with custom packages:

pychimera --gui

For developers

PyChimera provides access to Chimera’s modules from any Python 2.x interpreter. This is achieved in two steps:

1. patch_environ() patches environment variables with proper paths (packages and libraries). Since the original sys.path is exported to PYTHONPATH, you can use all your virtualenv/conda packages with Chimera. This call restarts Python to inject a new os.environ with os.execve.

2. enable_chimera() initializes Chimera. This is done through their own routines (chimeraInit).

PyChimera also offers its interface through python -m. This has not been tested, so it may not work. Add -i for interactive mode:

python -[i]m pychimera [-m another_module | -c "string" | script.py | ipython | notebook]

You can also try to launch it from IPython, but, again, some things may not work. Anyway, these two commands have the same effect:

pychimera ipython [notebook]
ipython -m pychimera [notebook]

If you want to run a script with IPython and then inspect the results (-i flag), your best bet is to run pychimera ipython and then call %run path/to/file.py inside the interpreter.

Notes

Obviously, you need to install Chimera in your computer. PyChimera will do its best to find the installation path automagically in the standard locations. If somehow it doesn’t succeed, you can always set an environment variable called CHIMERADIR in your .bashrc, or similar.

export CHIMERADIR="~/.local/UCSF-Chimera"

Chimera bundles its own distribution of some popular packages, like numpy, and those are loaded before your env packages for compatibility reasons. Be warned if you use specific versions for your project, because you can face strange bugs if you don’t take this into account.

Acknowledgments

Largely based on ideas by Greg Couch at chimera-users.