Running Ginga With stginga Plugins

stginga includes plugins beyond those provided by Ginga itself that add functionalities specific to STScI needs. There are a few different ways to start Ginga in a way that will make it recognize these plugins; Only use one of the following options:

  1. The stginga Script

  2. Change Ginga Configuration to Always Load stginga

  3. Manually Load stginga Plugins

The stginga Script

The simplest way is to use a script packaged with stginga that knows how to preload the STScI plugins:

stginga [args]

The accepted command line arguments are the same as for standard Ginga, except that there is no need to use --plugins and --modules to load STScI plugins.

Change Ginga Configuration to Always Load stginga

If you wish to have the stginga plugins always loaded when you start Ginga, you can set your local configuration to do this automatically. The key is to use Ginga’s built-in configuration machinery.

Create a $HOME/.ginga/ginga_config.py file or modify your existing copy with the following contents:

def pre_gui_config(ginga):
    from stginga import load_plugins
    load_plugins(ginga)

def post_gui_config(ginga):
    ginga.start_global_plugin('ChangeHistory')

Then, you can run Ginga natively as follows:

ginga [args]

Manually Load stginga Plugins

You can also run Ginga natively and just specify the plugins you want directly:

ginga --plugins=stginga.plugins.BackgroundSub,stginga.plugins.BadPixCorr,... [args]

If you do it this way, you need to manually start ChangeHistory global plugin from Ginga viewer, as it is not started by default in Ginga.