Installation process issues

[joshua-reynolds]

Hello,

I am having issues installing populationsim on multiple computers. When pip installing the populationsim library, I have encountered issues with the ctoolz library. The wheel file never builds properly. Perhaps there are steps missing from the documentation (e.g. installing visual studio, c++)?

Even after installing these extra libraries and software, I receive an error related to mismatched hdf5 library versions.

Or, I have received errors related to importing the numpy c-extentions.

Importing the numpy C-extensions failed. This error can happen for many reasons, often due to issues with your setup or how NumPy was installed."

Eventually I had to run thia code in command line to solve the numpy problem
set CONDA_DLL_SEARCH_MODIFICATION_ENABLE=1

Any suggestions or incites for a smoother installation process would be helpful!

Thanks!

[bettinardi]

Here's an email from our consulting team that might help:

"We experienced install issues with both PopulationSim and ActivitySim on Windows machines for various reasons such as IT security policies, picky dependencies, conflicts with local operating systems, etc. These issues led us to Docker. I’m not sure how familiar you are with Docker or containers in general but the idea is that you create a “container” of PopulationSim – a Docker image of PopulationSim that has all of PopulationSim’s dependencies, configurations, and necessary parts installed on a virtual operating system (Linux) - which then can be deployed on any machine with any operating system and it will run inside the container. So at runtime, a user can simply launch a container instance of PopulationSim that runs in a virtual machine on his/her local computer, without having to go through installation and/or configuration on his/her local OS."

If this works for you, please close the comment - thank you

[binnympaul]

Hi @joshua-reynolds: I was able to replicate the issue with populationSim installation. Looks like the latest cytoolz package has some compatibility issues with other dependencies in PopulationSim.

I could move past this issue by first installing a previous version of the cytoolz package (https://pypi.org/project/cytoolz/#history) and then following the installation steps outlined in the wiki. You can install the previous version of the cytoolz package in your conda environment as follows:
pip install cytoolz==0.11.0

I hope this will simplify your installation process.

[bettinardi]

Related to #142 - I'm hoping having PopSim install with ActivitySim will resolve issues like this.