What is the ESO Data Processing System (EDPS)?

EDPS is the recommended environment for data reduction of ESO data. All current and future instrument pipelines for VLT and ELT will be supported by EDPS. The development of the older EsoReflex environment with similar functionalities stopped in 2018. Support for it is provided on a best-effort basis.

EDPS automatically organises data from ESO instruments for pipeline processing and orchestrates the execution of the various pipeline recipes on them. It can be easily configured and executed via a graphical user interface, which offers visualisation of the results and re-execution of selected processing steps. A command line interface and direct access to its Python building-block functions are also available.

If you make use of EDPS for research that leads to a scientific publication, we request that you reference Freudling, Zampieri, Coccato et al. 2024, A&A 681, A93.

EDPS can be executed from the command line or with a dedicated GUI.

Prerequisites

  1. Recent Firefox or Chrome browser, Python 3.11 or higher (but there are issues with Python 3.14).

  2. At least one ESO pipeline with EDPS workflow should be installed on your system. To install the desired ESO pipelines, follow the instructions in the ESO pipelines pages. NOTE: the apptainer installation method is currently not supported.

    After the installation, the esorex command must be in the path. To test whether the installation was successful, type on a terminal:

    esorex --recipes

    A list of available recipes should appear.

  3. Install graphviz, which has to be included in the system path (defining aliases is not enough).

    Graphviz can be easily installed via:

    sudo apt install graphviz (Debian, Ubuntu)
sudo dnf install graphviz (Fedora)
brew install graphviz (MacOS)

  4. Optional: install also fv and ds9, to be able to visualise output plots. To install them, follow the instructions in the corresponding webpages.

    You can test whether these three packages are installed and their paths are correctly set by typing on a terminal:

    fv -version
ds9 -version
dot -V

Installation

To install EDPS, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new Python virtual environment and activate it:

    python3 -m venv edpsgui
. edpsgui/bin/activate

    Make sure the Python version is 3.11 or higher, but not 3.14.

  2. Install the required packages:

    pip install --extra-index-url https://ftp.eso.org/pub/dfs/pipelines/repositories/stable/src edps edpsgui edpsplot adari_core

Documentation

The EDPS GUI Quick Guide describes how to reduce data with the EDPS GUI.

A tutorial for executing EDPS from the command line is also available.

Tutorials for single instruments are also available here, providing easy plug-and-play guidance tailored to each instrument (and mode).

A tutorial on how to write EDPS workflows is also available.

The general principles of workflow designs and workflow syntax are also described in Freudling, Zampieri, Coccato et al. 2024, A&A 681, A93.

We recommend users who wish to write or edit a workflow to first look at this paper.

Feedback

Please direct any and all feedback concerning installing or using EDPS to the EDPS support team.