Repository structure

The Brian source code repository is broken into the following directories:

brian

The main package, documented above, with the following additional directories:

deprecated

For code that is no longer up to date, but that we keep for backwards compatibility.

experimental

Package for storing experimental code that can be used but whose syntax and functionality may change.

library

Modules where specific models are defined (e.g. neuron and synaptic models).

tests

Package for storing tests, composed of:

testcorrectness

Package for tests of mathematical correctness of algorithms, etc.

testinterface

Package for tests of individual Brian modules. Module names are the names of the module being tested prepended by ‘test’.

unused

Old stuff

utils

Modules that are not Brian-specific, for example circular.py defines circular arrays used for storing spiking events.

dev

The main development folder, for works in progress, debugging stuff, tools, etc. Consists of:

benchmarking

Code for benchmarking performance against other languages and simulators.

BEPs

The Brian Enhancement Proposals.

debugging

Dumping ground for files used for debugging a problem.

troubleshooting

Used for debugging problems from the brian-support mailing list.

ideas

For ideas for new features, incomplete implementations, etc. This is where new things go before going into the main Brian package or the experimental package.

logo

The Brian logo in various sizes.

optimising

Ideas for making Brian faster.

speedtracking

A sort of testing framework which tracks, over time, the speed of various Brian features.

tests

A few scripts to run Brian’s tests.

tools

The main folder for developer tools.

docs

Scripts for invoking Sphinx and building the documentation. Includes script to automatically generate documentation for examples and tutorials, and to build index entries for these.

newrelease

Tools for creating a new public release of Brian.

searchreplace

Some tools for doing global changes to the code (e.g. syntax changes).

dist

Automatically generated distribution files.

docs

Automatically generated documentation files in HTML/PDF format.

docs_sphinx

Sources for Sphinx documentation.

examples

Examples of Brian’s use. Documentation is automatically generated from all of these examples.

tutorials

Source files for the tutorials, documentation is automatically generated from these. Each tutorial has a directory, possibly containing an introduction.txt Sphinx source, followed by a series of files in alphabetical order (e.g. 1a, 1b, 1c, etc.). Multi-line strings are treated as Sphinx source code (take a look at a few examples to get the idea).