Advanced: Environment Variables

Setup

Let's first make sure we have the latest version of PHOEBE 2.3 installed (uncomment this line if running in an online notebook session such as colab).

Setting Environment Variables

Some settings cannot be changed after importing PHOEBE, so they are available via environment variables. These can be set in a variety of ways:

Setting inline before calling python will set for that single session of PHOEBE:

PHOEBE_ENABLE_PLOTTING=FALSE python [script.py]

Setting via the os package in python before importing PHOEBE allows you to set the setting everytime you run a given script:

import os
os.environ['PHOEBE_ENABLE_PLOTTING'] = 'FALSE'
import phoebe

Note for all boolean settings, the string is converted to uppercase and compared to 'TRUE'.

Plotting Options

PHOEBE_ENABLE_PLOTTING

PHOEBE_ENABLE_PLOTTING (TRUE by default) allows for disabling plotting within PHOEBE and therefore skipping the import of all plotting libraries (which take up a significant amount of the time it takes to import phoebe).

Passband Options

PHOEBE_ENABLE_ONLINE_PASSBANDS

PHOEBE_ENABLE_ONLINE_PASSBANDS (TRUE by default) dictates whether online passbands are queried and available for on-the-fly downloading. If you are sure you have all the local passbands you need, set this to False to save some time.

PHOEBE_DOWNLOAD_PASSBAND_DEFAULTS_CONTENT

PHOEBE_DOWNLOAD_PASSBAND_DEFAULTS_CONTENT ('all' by default, use comma separate for a list: 'ck2004,phoenix') allows setting the value for content in phoebe.set_download_passband_defaults. For more details, see the section above.

PHOEBE_DOWNLOAD_PASSBAND_DEFAULTS_GZIPPED

PHOEBE_DOWNLOAD_PASSBAND_DEFAULTS_GZIPPED (FALSE by default) allows setting the value for gzipped in phoebe.set_download_passband_defaults. For more details, see the section above.

PHOEBE_UPDATE_PASSBAND_IGNORE_VERSION

PHOEBE_UPDATE_PASSBAND_IGNORE_VERSION (FALSE by default) allows disabling the timestamp check used to require manually updating passbands when required content is missing. See phoebe.update_passband_ignore_version_on and phoebe.update_passband_ignore_version_off

PHOEBE_PBDIR

PHOEBE_PBDIR (empty by default) allows setting an additional custom directory to query for passbands, in addition to phoebe.list_passband_directories

MPI Options

PHOEBE_ENABLE_MPI

PHOEBE_ENABLE_MPI (defaults to TRUE if within mpirun/mpiexec, otherwise FALSE): whether to use internal parallelization. See also phoebe.mpi_on and phoebe.mpi_off

PHOEBE_MPI_NPROCS

PHOEBE_MPI_NPROCS (defaults to 4) allows setting the number of processors to spawn if MPI is enabled but not running within mpirun/mpiexec. See also: phoebe.mpi_on.