Published: Jan 24, 2025 by Liam Pattinson
Project info
Simplesimdb is a lightweight Python library for managing the creation and management of simulation data. It is capable of tracking input parameters and linking them to a local store of output files, and therefore avoid rerunning expensive simulations for which the input parameters have been seen before. It also permits users to search a set of previous input parameters to determine which outputs already exist.
Our health check of simplesimdb found that the code was written to a high standard, so
our work was instead focused on upgrading some of the surrounding infrastructure. This
included updating the packaging setup to use pyproject.toml, formatting with
black, linting with ruff, and setting up CI to automate testing,
linting and publishing. The in-code documentation was also upgraded to use NumPy doc
style, type hints were added throughout, and a set of online docs was created
using Sphinx and readthedocs.
We encountered some unexpected challenges, as the author preferred to keep the project as simple as possible. This included a requirement that the whole library should consist of a single Python module at the top-level of the project. This meant that some routine upgrades did not work as expected, and alternative tools had to be found. For instance, it was found that setuptools could not install a single module as a Python package, despite their documentation insisting otherwise! After some experimentation, it was found that hatchling provided a solution. In addition, we’d gotten into the habit of reusing Sphinx configurations between projects, but in this case we had to go back to basics and almost start from scratch. This turned out to be a very useful exercise, as I picked up a few new tricks in the process!