Migrating from astropy.io.misc.asdf to asdf-astropy

For the majority of users, migrating from astropy.io.misc.asdf to asdf-astropy requires no code changes at all. Instead, all users need to do is include asdf-astropy as an additional dependency to their package.

This is because when the asdf-astropy package is installed, it will automatically be used by ASDF when serializing and deserializing astropy objects. This occurs seamlessly because the interface used by asdf-astropy to extend ASDF is given preference over the one used by astropy.io.misc.asdf (which is currently deprecated).

Note

When ASDF version 3.0 is released, the interface used by astropy.io.misc.asdf will be removed. This means that using ASDF with astropy will stop functioning unless asdf-astropy is installed.

The only users of astropy.io.misc.asdf that need to do any code migration aside from adding an asdf-astropy dependency are those who directly use the objects (based on asdf.types.CustomType) defined in astropy.io.misc.asdf to create their own ASDF Converter extensions. Clear instructions on how to create the new converter extensions for ASDF can be found in Converters.