Eureka! FAQ

In this section you will find frequently asked questions about Eureka! as well as fixes for common problems

Common Errors

Missing packages during installation

If you are encountering errors when installing Eureka! like missing packages (e.g. extension_helpers), be sure that you are following the instructions on the on the Installation page. If you are trying to directly call setup.py using the python setup.py install command, you should instead be using a pip or conda installation command which helps to make sure that all required dependencies are installed in the right order and checks for implicit dependencies. If you still encounter issues, you should be sure that you are using a new conda environment as other packages you’ve previously installed could have conflicting requirements with Eureka!.

If you are following the installation instructions and still encounter an error, please open a new Issue on GitHub Issues and paste the full error message you are getting along with details about which python version and operating system you are using.

Issues installing or importing batman

Be sure that you are installing (or have installed) batman-package (not batman) from pip. If you have accidentally installed the wrong package you can try pip uninstalling it, but you may just need to make a whole new environment. In general, we strongly recommend you closely follow the instructions on the Installation page.

Issues installing or importing jwst

As a first step, make sure that you were following the instructions on the Installation page and were either using the conda environment.yml installation method or a pip installation command that included “[jwst]” like pip install .[jwst]. If you are getting error messages on linux that mention gcc, you likely need to first install gcc using sudo apt install gcc. If you are getting messages on macOS that mention clang, X-Code, and/or CommandLineTools, you need to make sure that CommandLineTools is first manually installed. CommandLineTools is installed whenever you first manually use a command that requires it like git, so one very simple way to install it would be to run git status in a terminal which should give a pop-up saying that command line developer tools must be installed first. Alternatively, you can instead run xcode-select --install which will install CommandLineTools.

If you were doing that and you are still receiving error messages, it is possible that something about your installation environment does not play well with jwst. You should open or comment on an already open issue on the Eureka! GitHub Issues page and tell us as many details as you can about every step you took to finally get to your error message as well as details about your operating system, python version, and conda version. You should also consider opening an issue on the jwst GitHub page as there may not be much we can do to help troubleshoot a package we have no control over.

Finally, if you simply cannot get jwst to install and still want to use later stages of the Eureka! pipeline, then you can install Eureka! using pip install . instead of pip install .[jwst] which will not install the jwst package. Note, however, that this means that Stages 1 and 2 will not work at all as Eureka’s Stages 1 and 2 simply offer ways of editing the behaviour of the jwst package’s Stages 1 and 2.

Matplotlib RuntimeError() whenever Eureka is imported and plt.show() is called

The importing of Eureka! sometimes causes a runtime error with Matplotlib. The error is related to latex and reads as the following

RuntimeError: Failed to process string with tex because latex could not be found

There are several workarounds to this problem. The first is to insert these lines prior to calling plt.show()

from matplotlib import rc
rc('text', usetex=False)

Another solution would be to catch it as an exception:

try:
  plt.show()
except RuntimeError:
  from matplotlib import rc
  rc('text', usetex=False)

Some more permanent solutions would be to:

Install the following sudo apt install cm-super, although this won’t always work
Identify where your TeX installation is and manually add it to PATH in your bashrc or bash_profile. An example of this is to change export PATH="~/anaconda3/bin:$PATH" in your ~/.bashrc file to export PATH="~/anaconda3/bin:~/Library/TeX/texbin:$PATH". For anyone using Ubuntu or an older version of Mac this might be found in /usr/bin instead. Make sure you run source ~/.bash_profile or source ~/.bashrc to apply the changes.

My question isn’t listed here!

First check to see if your question/concern is already addressed in an open or closed issue on the Eureka! GitHub Issues page. If not, please open a new issue and paste the full error message you are getting along with details about which python version and operating system you are using, and ideally the ecf you used to get your error (ideally copy-paste it into the issue in a quote block).