Installation

MPh

MPh is available on PyPI and can be readily installed via

pip install MPh

Requires JPype for the bridge from Python to Comsol’s Java API and NumPy for returning (fast) numerical arrays. Pip makes sure the two Python dependencies are installed and adds them if missing.

Run pip uninstall MPh to remove the package from your system. Note that this won’t uninstall the dependencies.

Comsol

Comsol, obviously, you need to license and install yourself. Versions 5.5 and newer are expected to work. Up to version 6.1, they have been successfully tested — at one point or another. A separate Java run-time environment is not required as Comsol ships with one already built in.

All major platforms are supported: Windows, Linux, macOS. Though ARM-based architectures are not, namely Apple Silicon on M1/M2 Macs. (Contribute to solving GitHub issue #80 if you want to remedy that.) Linux support has only been rigorously tested on Ubuntu. Occasional problems may occur on other distributions. Specifically with image exports, for which Comsol depends on external libraries.

Comsol is expected to be installed in the default location suggested by its installer. Though on Windows, custom locations are also supported, as the installer stores that information in the central registry, which MPh looks up.

Additionally, whichever Comsol installation starts when you run comsol in the console, will be found as well, even if in a custom location.

If you want to be able to select an alternative Comsol installation via MPh’s API, by passing the version argument to mph.start(), and that Comsol version happens to be installed in a custom location, you can create a symbolic link in ~/.local on Linux and in ~/Application on macOS. Have it point to the corresponding Comsol folder and give the link a name that starts with comsol.

Licenses

Comsol offers a number of license options for its products. Generally speaking, MPh assumes that, whichever license you use, things will “just work”. That is, you are able to start the Comsol GUI or invoke any of its command-line tools without extra configuration. Because Comsol’s license management handles that in one way or another. This is true for the most common license types: “CPU-locked” and “floating network”.

For other license types, that may not be the case. For example, the “class kit” license requires you to pass the command-line argument -ckl when starting Comsol. In this particular case, you can tell MPh to do the same, by setting mph.option('classkit', True) before calling mph.start().

Other “unusual” license types may not be supported. If you want to change that, open an issue and explain how they are different.