Installation¤

The simplest way to install ripple is through pip:

pip install rippleGW

This will install the latest stable release and its dependencies. ripple is built on JAX. By default, this installs the CPU version of JAX. If you have an NVIDIA GPU, install the CUDA-enabled version:

pip install "rippleGW[cuda]"

If you want to install the latest version of ripple, you can clone this repo and install it locally:

git clone https://github.com/GW-JAX-Team/ripple.git
cd ripple
pip install -e .

We recommend using uv to manage your Python environment. After cloning the repository, run uv sync to create a virtual environment with all dependencies installed.

Continuous-wave ephemeris data¤

The CW waveform models (PulsarSignal, ExactPulsarSignal, BinaryPulsarSignal) need a LALPulsar Earth/Sun ephemeris file, which isn't bundled with ripple. By default this is downloaded automatically and cached locally the first time it's needed, so most users don't need to do anything.

If you're running on a machine without internet access -- e.g. an HPC compute node -- that automatic download will fail. Run this once on a machine that does have internet access (e.g. the cluster's login node):

ripplegw-fetch-ephemeris

The cache directory ($RIPPLEGW_CACHE_DIR, or ~/.cache/ripplegw/ephemeris by default) is normally on shared/home storage, so a later job on a node without internet access will find the file already cached and never attempt a download.