Applications#

simtools are applications that execute a well defined task. The naming convention for simtools is simtools-<application name>, where <application name> is the name of the application in lower-case snake_case format.

Configuration#

Applications in simtools are configured by the following four equivalent approaches:

  1. command-line arguments

  2. configuration files (in YAML format)

  3. configuration dictionary when calling the Configurator class

  4. environment variables

To illustrate this, the example below sets the path pointing towards the directory for all data products.

Set the output directory using a command-line argument:

<application_name> --output_path <path name>

Set the output directory using a configuration file in YAML format:

config_file: <path name>

Load the YAML configuration file into the application with:

<application_name> --config <my_config.yml>

Configuration parameter read from a environmental variable:

EXPORT SIMTOOLS_OUTPUT_PATH="<path name>"

Configuration methods can be combined; conflicting configuration settings raise an Exception. Configuration parameters are generally expected in lower-case snake-make case. Configuration parameters for each application are printed to screen when executing the application with the --help option. Parameters with the same functionality are named consistently the same among all applications.

List of applications#