Installing REBOUND is very easy. Rebound does not depend on any libraries. However, you need to have python (version 2 or 3) and a C compiler installed. Most likely, you already have those on your system.
If you don't, and aren't sure how to go about getting them, it is probably easiest to install either the Enthought or Anaconda python distributions (which are free and come with typically used libraries and an easy-to-use installer). For the C compiler on Mac, it's probably easiest to install Xcode from the App store.
Before you start, you can create a virtual environment to keep your python installation clean. This is recommended, but not necessary. You need to have virtualenv installed (if you use the Anaconda python distribution, you'll need to instead create a conda environment - see below).
To create a virtual environment, simply open a terminal window, go to the folder where you want REBOUND to be installed (e.g. /home/username/rebound/) and enter:
virtualenv venv
This creates a virtual environment named venv. To activate it, type:
source venv/bin/activate
If you log out of your terminal or open a new one, you'll need to reactivate the virtual environment with the above command (if the environment is active you'll see its name in parentheses before the command prompt).
If you use the Anaconda distribution, the above likely will not work. To create a conda environment run the following command:
conda create -n venv pip
source activate venv
Now you can install REBOUND using pip. All you have to do is type the following into a terminal window (if you created a virtual environment above you should first run the appropriate activate command depending on whether you used virtualenv or conda):
pip install rebound
The setup script will download the latest version of REBOUND from PyPI (the Python Package Index), compile the C code in the background and place all the files in their correct location. No other libraries are needed to start working with WHFast and REBOUND, but you might want to install numpy and matplotlib to be able to post-process your data and make plots. For analysis tools (and to run FourierSpectrum.ipynb) you might also want scipy. Installing those libraries is also very easy (but may need a few minutes). Depending on whether you use virtualenv or conda, use
pip install numpy matplotlib scipy
or
conda install numpy matplotlib scipy
That's all there is to do!
Instead of using pip to install the latest version of REBOUND from PyPI, you can also install REBOUND directly from github. This is useful if you want to make changes to REBOUND.
First clone the repository (you might need to create a github account):
git clone git@github.com:hannorein/rebound.git
If you already know that you might be contributing something to REBOUND, you can also first fork the repository on github and then clone your own repository.
Next, create a virtual environment with the same commands as above:
virtualenv venv && source venv/bin/activate
Now you can install rebound from source using
pip install -e .
You can modify the python module files in the directory rebound/ and you'll see the changed the next time you run a python script (no need to reinstall the REBOUND package every time).
If you install REBOUND directly from github, you can also run it without python. Have a look at the README file in the main directory and at the examples in the examples/ directory for examples in C. These are much more diverse than the python examples (e.g. allow you to use a tree code for gravity calculations, use other boundary conditions, etc).
The tutorials in python_tutorials were written using iPython/Jupyter notebooks. You can view them directly on GitHub. If you want to edit them or create your own notebook, you'll need to install iPython (make sure to activate the virtual environment first if you created one)
pip install "ipython[notebook]"
or
conda install ipython-notebook
You can then open iPython notebooks in your browser by typing
ipython notebook
To create a new notebook select from the dropdown menu on the top right the item that says 'New'. Now you can interactively follow the commands in the tutorials or run your own!