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Installation

In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Simmate with Anaconda and start up a local server. Beginners will also be introduced to the command-line.

Danger

In this tutorial and others, beginners without coding experience should skip the quick-start tutorial section and jump straight to the full tutorial. The critical steps in each are exactly the same, but the full tutorial includes extra exploration of the software and how to use it.

Quick start

  1. Install anaconda
  2. Create a conda environment, install Simmate in it, and activate it. (note: Spyder is our recommended IDE but optional) 
    conda create -n my_env -c conda-forge python=3.11 simmate
conda install -n my_env -c conda-forge spyder  # optional but recommended
conda activate my_env
  3. Run the simmate --help command to make sure it's installed correctly
  4. For first-time setup, initialize your local database with simmate database reset
  5. Run the command simmate run-server (and leave this command running)
  6. Go to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and you'll see you local server!

Note, this server is only accessible on your local computer. For a production-ready server, see our website documentation.

Note

Simmate itself is <2MB, but when installed to a clean conda environment, the entire download for all it's dependencies comes to ~1.2GB. Additional disk space is also needed for optional downloads -- such as third-party data.

Speed-up your installation

Faster Conda

While it is the recommended way to install Simmate, conda can be extremely slow. It can take >20 minutes to solve the environment on some systems because of Simmate's many large dependencies.

We therefore suggest experienced users try the following:

  • set conda config --set channel_priority strict
  • use the libmamba solver

Mamba

Instead of Anaconda, you could just use Mamba from the start. In fact, our team uses micromamba for our CI, so this is well tested.

mamba create -n my_env -c conda-forge python=3.10 simmate

Pip

Pip is the default package installer for python, but be warned that it can cause problems for beginners (especially those on Windows PCs):

pip install simmate

Danger

Pip should only be used as an absolute last resort for installing Simmate. Do this only if you are an advanced python user and understand how to manage your python env's effectively.