The Kepler GO office recommends that users of the PyKE software do so within the STScI Python environment (based around PyRAF). However, for users unwilling to install IRAF and PyRAF on their machine, we have modified PyKE so that it will run both inside PyRAF or standalone within a unix/linux shell environment.

Install the above software packages. It is recommended that the items are installed in the above order. PyKE comes as a tar file which may extracted anywhere the user wishes.

The standalone version of PyKE is run from the command line on a terminal. The method for running a PyKE command has the syntax

% python command_name.py --shell positional_arg1 positional_arg2 --option optional_arg1 --True_flag

where the list of commands is given on the PyKE homepage. For example, when running the kepdraw tool one might use the command

% python kepdraw.py --shell Q5data.fits Q5data.png --datacol PDCSAP_FLUX --quality

All commands can be given the -h or --help flag and a list of positional and optional arguments is displayed with a short description of the argument's function. Note the --shell argument must always be given even when just using the -h or --help flag, e.g.

% python kepdraw.py --shell --help