Get a good scientific Python environment

By a “good Python environment”, I mean a recent version of Python with recent versions of the main packages for sciences installed (SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib, IPython, h5py, etc.) and a good editor with fly checks.

The easy way: Mambaforge and conda-forge

A very simple way to get such environment is to use Mambaforge (provided by the Miniforge project), which is a modified version of Miniconda with the new and fast cross-platform package manager mamba and using by default the community driven conda-forge channel.

wget "https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Mambaforge-$(uname)-$(uname -m).sh" -O Mambaforge_installer.sh
bash Mambaforge_installer.sh -b
$HOME/mambaforge/bin/mamba init bash

Command wget not found?

You might be more lucky with the equivalent command with curl:

curl -L https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Mambaforge-$(uname)-$(uname -m).sh -o Mambaforge_installer.sh

Warning

In some systems, the default shell is not bash so you need to modified the last command to initialize your shell. For example for macOS: $HOME/mambaforge/bin/mamba init zsh.

When it’s done, try to open a new terminal (click on ctrl-alt-t) and check that the line in the new terminal starts with (base). If yes, you can close the old terminal (with ctrl-d). The indication (base) means that you use the base “environment”.

conda and mamba are 2 commandline tools to manage software installations and create “environments”.

conda and mamba: differences?

Conda is an open source package management system and environment management system that runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and z/OS.

Mamba is a new implementation of conda, which is faster for some operations and has better logging.

Definition: conda environment

A environment is a set of programs and libraries with particular versions. An environment is defined by the software installed on your computer and by environment variables, in particular the variable $PATH, which contains all the paths where your shell looks for programs (you can read the output of echo $PATH).

It is very useful to be able to create different environments for different tasks. It is usually better to keep the base environment only for the conda / mamba software and to use different environments for other tasks. We will use this strategy here. We will have

  • 1 environment for some basic libraries and Fluidsim sequential (called main),

  • 1 environment with Fluidsim and MPI (called env_fluidsim)

  • 1 environment with the Spyder editor (automatically created with the tool conda-app)

  • 1 environment with Mercurial (automatically created with the tool conda-app)

conda takes the programs that it installs from “channels”. With Fluiddyn, we’d like to use the largest open-source community driven channel called conda-forge. With Miniforge, conda-forge is by default the main channel.

We can start by creating the main environment with the commands:

wget https://foss.heptapod.net/fluiddyn/fluiddyn/-/raw/branch/default/doc/main_environment.yml
mamba env create -f main_environment.yml

The file main_environment.yml contains the following:

name: main
dependencies:
  # standard packages
  - ipython
  - numpy
  - matplotlib
  - ipympl
  - scipy
  - pandas
  # fluidsim (sequential)
  - fluidsim
  # jupyterlab and nice extension
  - jupyterlab
  - jupyterlab-myst
  - jupyterlab-spellchecker
  - jupyterlab-variableInspector
  # to be able to use this environment with Spyder
  - nb_conda_kernels

Tip

The line conda activate main can be added at the end of your ~/.bashrc.

Then, we create another environment for Fluidsim parallel with:

mamba create -n env-fluidsim -y \
  fluidsim "fluidfft=*=mpi*" "h5py=*=mpi*" openmpi \
  ipython matplotlib ipympl ipykernel spyder-kernels \
  "pyfftw=0.13.0=py310*_0"

To install up-to-date versions of useful applications like Mercurial and Spyder, you can run:

pip install conda-app
conda-app install mercurial
conda-app install spyder

Note

conda-app is a very small utility which installs programs in isolated conda environments. Very similar to pipx but with conda environment.

Note

In some clusters, it is better to use the native mpi library. To do so, one needs to install mpi4py from source (i.e. with pip install mpi4py and not with conda).

Note

To compile Python files with Pythran (which is done when one builds some fluiddyn packages from source) one can install clang (with mamba install clangdev) to compile C++ files produced by Pythran.

Warning

There are cases for which it is useful to specify the blas version by adding blas=*=openblas to the requirements. This is important if you want to use the library fftw_mpi, which is incompatible with MKL.

Another easy way (slightly more difficult?)

Recent versions of Linux come with good recent versions of Python, so it is now often very reasonable to use /usr/bin/python3 (you can check with /usr/bin/python3 --version). However, if you use /usr/bin/python3, it is really better to create a virtual environment as described in the official Python documentation on Installing using pip in virtual environments.

Moreover, it is now very easy to build the most recent Python versions with pyenv.

With recent versions of pip and the wheels, it is now easy and fast to install scientific packages without conda, using pip.

But without conda, one needs to get the non-python dependencies with the system package management tool, for example apt for Debian/Ubuntu, as shown here