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Changelog#

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

[Unreleased]#

Added#

Fixed#

Changed#

[0.3.0] - 2025-09-05#

Added#

  • Add verbose=False as a new argument to prepare_wbt.

Fixed#

  • More robust handling of overwriting files on Windows for the two DEM retrieval functions. Previously, in some edge cases, the file handles were not released in time, causing permission errors when trying to overwrite existing files.

Changed#

  • Drop support for Python 3.9 since it has reached its end of life.

[0.2.9] - 2025-02-18#

Added#

  • For dem_utils.get_3dep use seamless-3dep package to support any resolution not only 10, 30, and 60 meters. This Python library is more performant and caches downloaded intermediate files to avoid downloading the same files multiple times. This change requires adding optional seamless-3dep as a new dependency for the dem_utils module.
  • For dem_utils.get_nasadem use tiny-retriever package for a more performant and reliable way to download the NASADEM data. Similarly, it caches downloaded intermediate files to avoid downloading the same files multiple times. This change requires adding tiny-retriever as a optional new dependency for the dem_utils module.

Fixed#

  • In whitebox_tools function when files_to_save is not provided, before moving the output files to save_dir, check if the output files already exist in the save_dir and remove them before moving the new output files. This is to avoid an issue with shutil.move which fails to overwrite existing files.

[0.2.8] - 2025-01-09#

This release adds filelock as a dependency and tomli as an optional dependency.

Added#

  • Add a command line interface to allow invoking pywbt from the command line. It only requires specifying path to a configuration file written in TOML format. This adds tomli as a new optional dependency for parsing the TOML configuration file if Python version is less than 3.11. Otherwise, Python's built-in tomllib module is used to parse the configuration file.An example configuration file can be found here.
pywbt path/to/config.toml

  • Make prepare_wbt public so users can run this function once to download the WBT executable and then use the whitebox_tools function to run the tools. This can help avoid downloading the WBT executable multiple times when running pywbt in parallel or in different scripts.

  • Use filelock library so only one instances of prepare_wbt can download the WBT executable at a time. This is to avoid race conditions when multiple processes try to setup the WBT executable at the same time.

[0.2.7] - 2024-10-31#

Fixed#

  • Fix an issue when a Shapefile exists as input or output in the arg_dict. The issue would have caused an infinite loop when trying to copy the Shapefile and its auxiliary files. (#3)

[0.2.6] - 2024-10-09#

Fixed#

  • Fix a bug in extracting WBT executable from the zip file. The bug impacted mostly users who run PyWBT on cluster environments where the tempfile modules uses system's temporary directory which in most cases is not reliable. The fix is to use the tempfile.TemporaryDirectory context manager to create a temporary directory in the current working directory.

[0.2.5] - 2024-10-08#

Fixed#

  • Automatically add auxiliary files of Shapefile when they exist in arg_dict. This ensures that the auxiliary files are also stored to save_dir when files_to_save is provided.

[0.2.4] - 2024-09-24#

Added#

  • Add a new module called dem_utils that contains utilities for downloading and reading DEM data from 3DEP and NASADEM. Note that the module has some additional dependencies that need to be installed. To install these dependencies, use:
pip install pywbt[dem]

or using micromamba:

micromamba install -c conda-forge pywbt 'geopandas-base>=1' planetary-computer pystac-client rioxarray

[0.2.3] - 2024-09-19#

Added#

  • When an exception occurs during running WBT, propagate the exception and clean up before existing.
  • If for some reason simply running WBT fails, redownload the WBT executable and try again. This is to avoid the situation where the WBT executable is corrupted or not downloaded properly or is not compatible with the system platform.
  • Add two new helper function that can be used to get the list of available tools, their respective descriptions and parameters: list_tools and tool_parameters. For better viewing and querying the outputs of these two functions, it is recommended to use the pandas library. For example, you can use pd.Series(pywbt.list_tools()) to get a pandas.Series of the available tools, and pd.DataFrame(pywbt.tool_parameters("BreachDepressions")) to get a pandas.DataFrame of the parameters for the BreachDepressions tool.

[0.2.2] - 2024-09-17#

Added#

  • Make files_to_save optional in the whitebox_tools function. If not provided, all generated intermediate files will be stored in save_dir (default is the source directory).
  • Improvements to documentation including writing, the look and feel of the documentations, and a new section for WBT workflows that can be found here.

Changed#

  • Avoid copying all files from the src_dir to the temporary directory, instead, run the tools in the src_dir itself. This change will avoid copying large files and could improve performance. With this change, all intermediate files will be stored in src_dir unless files_to_save is provided which will save only the specified output files and delete the rest of the intermediate files.
  • Improve performance by extracting and copying the input files using zipfile.ZipFile.extractall and shutil.copytree.
  • Improve the logic of determining the type of system platform by only calling platform.system() once and caching the result.
  • Improve the writing of the documentation.

[0.2.0] - 2024-09-2#

Highlights#

This is a breaking change release. The whitebox_tools function now takes care of running the tools in a temporary directory and saving the output files to a specified directory. This change makes the function more user-friendly and easier to use.

Changed#

  • Add two new arguments and remove one argument from the whitebox_tools function. The new arguments are:

  • src_dir (a str or Path): Path to the source directory containing the input files. All user input files will be copied from this directory to a temporary directory for processing. Note that when using these files in arg_dict, you should use the filenames without the directory path since the internal working directory of the WhitboxTools is set to the temporary directory where the files are copied.

  • save_dir (a str or Path): Path to the directory where the output files will be saved. If not provided, the output files will be saved in the source directory.
  • files_to_save (a list of str): List of output files to save to the save_dir. Note that these should be the filenames without the directory path, just as they are used in the arg_dict, i.e. the values that are passed by -o or --output in the WhiteboxTools command.

The removed argument is:

  • work_dir: This argument is no longer needed since the working directory is set to the temporary directory where the input files are copied.

  • All examples have been updated to reflect the changes in the whitebox_tools function.

Added#

  • A new example notebooks has been added to compute Topographic Wetness Index (TWI) using PyWBT for a watershed in Houston, Texas.
  • In the Delineate Basins notebook added a new plot for the mainstems.
  • Added a new function to the utils module of the example notebooks to get DEM data from the USGS's 3D Elevation Program (3DEP).

[0.1.1] - 2024-09-1#

  • This release has no changes, it is just to trigger the release process since the initial release on PyPi did not include the archive which is needed for conda-forge to build the package.

[0.1.0] - 2024-08-31#

  • Initial release.