Running a model¶

Run ZEN-garden¶

In a terminal or command prompt, change your directory to the <data> folder (i.e. the directory that contains your model and the config.json)
```
cd <data>
```
Activate the ZEN-garden environment (see instructions).
Execute the following lines to run ZEN-garden:
```
zen-garden --dataset="1_base_case"
```
This will run the ZEN-garden model 1_base_case, provide that it was downloaded as described in Builing a model. To run other datasets, replace "1_base_case" with the name of (or path to) the dataset that you wish to run. Once the model finishes, the output files will be stored in a new directory outputs in your current working directory.

Tip

ZEN-garden provides tools for easily reading and visualizing the outputs. For an introduction on how to analyze and visualize model outputs, see the tutorial on analyzing outputs.

Additional Remarks and Tips¶

ZEN-garden can also be run without providing any command line flags:
```
zen-garden
```
In this case, ZEN-garden will look for the name of the dataset in the analysis/dataset entry of config.json.
If you have multiple config.json files in your working directory, you can specify the file you want to use with the config argument:
```
zen-garden --config="config.json" --dataset="1_base_case"
```
ZEN-garden can also be run from with a python script. You may find this to be more familiar than using the command line. The following python code can be used to run ZEN-garden, provided that it is run from within an environment in which ZEN-garden is installed:
```
from zen_garden import run
import os

os.chdir("<data>")
run(dataset = "1_base_case")
```
In this code, replace <data> with the path to your data folder (i.e. the directory that contains the config.json). The dataset argument of the function run can be used to specify the name of the dataset that should be run.

Note that the run function can take as an optional input arguments any flags which can also be specified in the command line. For instance, in order to specify a config file, you can use the code below. See zen_garden.runner.run() for full documentation of the run function.
```
from zen_garden import run
import os

os.chdir("<data>")
run(dataset = "1_base_case", config="<my_config.json>")
```