# Quickstart

Welcome to the SKA SDP ICAL repository. This contains all SKAO-specific scripts, configuration files, 
tests and documentation for running ICAL, which is a wrapper around [Rapthor](https://git.astron.nl/RD/rapthor).

Full documentation is hosted on 
[ReadTheDocs](https://developer.skao.int/projects/ska-sdp-ical/en/latest/).

For details on the pipeline itself, see the 
[Rapthor documentation](https://rapthor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). 

## Running ICAL inside a container

**Note:** If you use VS Code, you can use the Dev Containers extension to automatically build and 
run the development environment. Simply open the project in VS Code and select "Reopen in Container" 
when prompted.

### Building the container

Open a terminal and navigate to the directory you want to clone the project. Clone the project 
repository using git:

```bash
git clone https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/sdp/science-pipeline-workflows/ska-sdp-ical.git
cd ska-sdp-ical
```

Start a podman (or docker) machine if you don't have one already.

Build the container image using the provided Dockerfile. This requires approximately 12 GB of 
free disk space. The repository includes a multi-stage Dockerfile with different build targets:

Build the test target:

```bash
podman build --target test -f Dockerfile -t ska-sdp-ical:test .
```

### Running the container

Run the container, mounting the current directory to `/app` in the container:

```bash
podman run -it --rm -v $(pwd):/app localhost/ska-sdp-ical:test
```

This will start an interactive bash session in the container with all runtime dependencies installed. You can now run rapthor inside the container.