Creating our environment and installing Simmate

For now, let's create a new environment that uses the conda-forge channel. A channel is where anaconda downloads packages from -- and to keep things simple, we will ALWAYS use conda-forge (this is the standard in the python community).

---

1. Create the environment

Now let's run this command below. Note you can switch out the name my_env for whatever you want here, just make sure you use underscores instead of spaces (my_env will work while my env will give an error).

conda create -c conda-forge -n my_env python=3.11

Say yes when the installation asks for confirmation.

---

2. Activate the environment

Next, switch to this new environment. To do that we use...

conda activate my_env

You'll see the start of your command line switch from (base) to (my_env) if this worked successfully.

---

3. Install Simmate

Next, we want to install Simmate.

conda install -c conda-forge -n my_env simmate

This may take a few minutes to run and install. But once it's done, you've now successfully installed Simmate! If you ran into any errors with this very last command, please let our team know immediately by posting a new issue here.

Tip

If your installation is extremely slow (>20 minutes), you may want to read through our "Speed-up your installation" section.

---

4. Install Spyder

As an extra, let's use Anaconda to install Spyder. Spyder is what we will use to write python in later tutorials. But now that we have Anaconda set up, installing new programs can be done in just one line:

conda install -c conda-forge -n my_env spyder

---