The ini file

The primary user-inputs to bilby_pipe is an ini file and optionally additional command-line arguments. To handle both command line arguments and ini-files, we use the ConfigArgParse python module.

An ini file can contain multiple types of input. In this example, we demonstrate passing in a float for the trigger-time attribute, an integer for the duration, a list for the detectors, a boolean for the coherence-test, and a dictionary of sampler-kwargs:

# config.ini
trigger-time = 1126259462.4
duration = 4
detectors = [H1, L1]
sampler-kwargs = {nlive: 500, n_check_point: 1000}

For dictionaries, the input can be quite loose, for example here we use mixed colons, equals signs and quotations.

sampler-kwargs = {nlive: 500, method='rwalk', 'n_check_point' = 1000}

Additional command-line arguments can be given, or those in the ini file overwritten, for example

$ bilby_pipe config.ini --duration 8

will overwrite the duration argument provided in the ini file.

We can generate an ini file with current documentation and all of the default options by running

$ bilby_pipe_write_default_ini default.ini

The ini file for GraceDB events can be generated using the command line program bilby_pipe_gracedb with the arguments --gracedb for example, to generate an ini file for the GraceDB event G298936 we use the following command,

$ bilby_pipe_gracedb --gracedb G298936 --output ini

This will produce an ini file, bilby_config.ini, which automatically sets an appropriate configuration and is ready for submission.