AMUSE provides a rich toolbox of astrophysical methodology, but it’s in the nature of science to try to do new things, and sometimes that requires modifying the methods too. For computational science, that means changing the software. In case of AMUSE, if this is what you want to do then you’ll probably want to modify one of the codes included with it, changing its C++ or Fortran code and recompiling it to try your modifications.
To do that, it’s best to get a development copy of the AMUSE code using git. That will give you a local git repository so that you can easily track your changes, and contribute them back to AMUSE (pretty please?) if they’re potentially useful to others.
To get a development copy of the AMUSE source code, you’ll need git, which is
available from every popular package manager. In your Conda environment,
conda install git
will get you sorted. Next, you can get a local git repository with AMUSE in it using
git clone https://github.com/amusecode/amuse.git
This will create a directory called amuse with the latest development version of
AMUSE in it. You can cd into that and access the installer using ./setup as
before.
If you have an existing installation that’s not too old, then you can probably just switch the code you’re interested in to development mode using the installer in the new source directory:
./setup develop amuse-bhtree
This will uninstall the existing package (we’ll use bhtree in this example, but you can use any of them), and replace it with a development install. Development installs are special because rather than copying the code into the environment, they link it. As a result, you can try your changes right away, without having to reinstall every time. That’s really convenient.
Once you have a development installation, you can go to the code’s source:
cd src/amuse_bhtree
and have a look around. You’ll find an interface.py that defines the code’s
interface with AMUSE, the tests/ directory with tests, and a directory src/ with
the source code. There’s also a bhtree_worker, or perhaps even multiple. This file
is created from the bhtree source code together with its AMUSE wrapper using
make bhtree_worker
To modify the code, open a file in src/ and change it to your liking, then run the
make command above in the src/amuse_bhtree directory to recompile the worker.
Then you can run your Python script (in the same environment of course!) to try it out
and see if it works.