Installation

A small part of Alfred is written in C, so you will need to have a gcc (C compiler) installed before installing Alfred.

Alfred has not been tested on Windows operating systems. If you are using a Windows device, we recommend installing WSL and running Alfred in Linux.

We also recommend installing and running Alfred in a conda environment. Install anaconda or miniconda here. The safest route is to install Alfred in a fresh environment. You can create a new one by running

$ conda create -n alfred python

You can replace “alfred” with whatever environment name you want, and if you run into issues later on in the install, trying setting python=3.13.

Next, activate your new environment and pip install the package:

$ conda activate alfred
$ python -m pip install alfred-exoplanets

If you are planning to use Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb files), you will likely need to install ipykernel and/or ipywidgets. You can do this with:

$ conda install -c conda-forge ipykernel ipywidgets

Finally, if you are using WSL, you may run into font formatting issues with Alfred’s GUIs. This can be resolved by installing a different version of tk:

$ conda install -c conda-forge tk=*=xft_*

Optionally, you can also install ExoCTK if you want to generate limb darkening grids for more bands than are included by default. This is not required to run Alfred, and I recommend not installing it unless you specifically need more limb darkening grids. If you do choose to install ExoCTK, follow the installation instructions here.