Installation

This page is a placeholder for the production installation guide. The current ASTROLAB development environment is Python-based and uses a Conda environment, PySide6 for the desktop application, Orekit for astrodynamics, and MkDocs for documentation.

Recommended Development Layout

ASTROLAB is expected to be stored as a normal Git repository:

ASTROLAB_beta/
  docs/
  src/
    astrolab/
  mkdocs.yml
  README.md
  LICENSE

The src/astrolab directory contains the application source code. The docs directory contains this documentation site. Both should be version controlled so that code and documentation evolve together.

Conda Environment

The application is normally launched from the project Conda environment. The exact environment file should be documented here once frozen for distribution.

Typical development steps are:

1. Clone the private repository.
2. Create or update the Conda environment.
3. Activate the environment.
4. Launch ASTROLAB from the application entry point.
5. Serve documentation locally with MkDocs when writing docs.

Documentation Preview

When MkDocs is installed in the active environment, the documentation site can be previewed from the repository root:

mkdocs serve

The local preview is usually available at:

http://127.0.0.1:8000

Deployment Notes

For a company documentation site, a common workflow is:

Option	Use case
GitHub Pages	Simple private or public hosted documentation from the repository.
Custom domain	Documentation served under a branded domain such as docs.stellor.space.
Squarespace main site	Marketing website and company pages, with documentation linked externally.

The recommended architecture is to keep the documentation source in the ASTROLAB repository and publish the generated site through GitHub Pages or a dedicated documentation host.