Running Gaia Sky
If you installed the software using an installer or a package manager
system (rpm
, deb
), you just need to use the standard running
procedures of your Operating System to run the application.
Linux
Just type gaiasky
in a terminal or use your favourite desktop
environment search engine to run the Gaia Sky launcher.
Windows
In windows, this means clicking on Start
and then browsing the start
menu folder Gaia Sky
. You can run the executable from there.
macOS X
Locate the launcher in your install directory (usually /Applications
) and double click on it.
Code and pakcage
However, if you are a maverick and do not like installers, you can also
run the Gaia Sky directly from the source code in GitHub
or
using the tgz
package.
CLI arguments
Gaia Sky offers a few command line arguments:
$ gaiasky -h
Usage: gaiasky [options]
Options:
-c, --cat-chooser
Displays the catalog chooser dialog at startup
Default: false
-d, --ds-download
Displays the download dialog at startup
Default: false
-h, --help
Shows help
-v, --version
Lists version and build inforamtion
Default: false
Running from source
Requirements
If you want to compile the source code, you will need the following:
JDK8+
git
Please, be aware that only tags
are guaranteed to work
(here). The master
branch holds the development version and the configuration files are
possibly messed up and not ready to work out-of-the-box. So remember to
use a tag
version if you want to run it right away from source.
First, clone the repository:
$ git clone https://gitlab.com/langurmonkey/gaiasky.git
Getting the catalog data
Hint
As of version 2.1.0
, Gaia Sky provides a self-contained downloade manager to get all the data packs available.
Gaia Sky offers a downloade manager to get the desired data packs. The base-data
pack is necessary for Gaia Sky to run, and
contains the solar system, the Milky Way model, NBG, SDSS, etc. Catalog files are optional. You can bring up the downloade manager at
any time by clicking on the button Data download
in the preferences window, data tab. More information on the download
manager can be found in Data download manager.
You can also download the data packs manually here.
Compiling and running
To compile the code and run Gaia Sky run the following.
$ gradlew core:run
In order to pull the latest changes from the GitHub repository:
$ git pull
Packaging Gaia Sky
Gaia Sky can be exported to a folder to be run as a standalone app with the following.
$ gradlew core:dist
That will create a new folder called releases/gaiasky-[version].[revison]
with the exported application. Run scripts
are provided with the name gaiasky
(Linux, macOS) and gaiasky.cmd
(Windows).
Also, to export Gaia Sky into a tar.gz
archive file, run the following.
$ gradlew core:createTar
In order to produce the desktop installers for the various systems you
need a licensed version of Install4j
. Then, you need to run:
$ gradlew core:pack
These command will produce the different OS packages (.exe
, .dmg
, .deb
, .rpm
, etc.)
of Gaia Sky into releases/packages-[version].[revision]
folder.
Running from downloaded package
If you prefer to run the application from the tar.gz
package, follow the instructions below.
Linux
In order to run the application on Linux, open the terminal, uncompress
the archive, give execution permissions to the gaiasky
script and then
run it.
$ tar zxvf gaiasky-[version].tar.gz
$ cd gaiasky-[version]/
$ gaiasky
Windows
In order to run the application on Windows, open a terminal window (type
cmd
in the start menu search box) and run the gaiasky.cmd
file.
$ cd path_to_gaiasky_folder
$ gaiasky.cmd
macOS X
To run the application on macOS, follow the instructions in the Linux section.