User guide¶

Forest is a wrapper around a Python library called bokeh. In the future it is intended to harness the full power of Tornado web server to allow user specific settings, to capture survey results and to allow annotations but for now it is only a light weight viewer.

Installation¶

FOREST is available on conda-forge. To install it inside a conda environment run the following command.

conda install -c conda-forge

Basic usage¶

FOREST can be run as a command to quickly view files on disk.

forest --show file.nc

Configuration file¶

A configuration file is a convenient way to compare multiple datasets spread across file systems and web based catalogues. There is support for variable substitution of either environment variables or through the command line --var KEY VALUE flag. Multiple --var flags can be specified to substitute more than one variable.

example.yaml¶

files:
  - label: UM
    pattern: ${HOME}/file.nc
  - label: RDT
    pattern: ${prefix}/file.json

Would be equivalent to the following file

example.yaml.processed¶

files:
  - label: UM
    pattern: /Users/Bob/file.nc
  - label: RDT
    pattern: /some/dir/file.json