Note
We suggest that you use Python 2.7.3 or higher, especialy in production (although Python 3+ is not tested). There is a bug in Python 2.7.2 that could affect FireWorks (although we haven’t seen any problems yet).
To prepare for installation, you should:
Tip
if you have easy_install configured, e.g. through setuptools, you should be able to install pip using the command easy_install pip. You should make sure that setuptools is installed using the proper Python version and probably without the --user option if running ez_setup.py.
Virtualenv is a tool that allows you to separate your FireWorks installation from your other Python installations. For example, you might want to use Python 2.7 for FireWorks, but Python 3+ for other Python codes you’re interested in using. Or, you might have different versions of Python libraries supporting FireWorks and your other installations. This is often the case on shared machinesp. if you’re interested in this option, you might consider a virtualenv install. Otherwise, just follow the installation instructions below.
The easiest way to install FireWorks is to simply run a one-liner in pip. The downside of this method is that it is more difficult to view and edit the source code.
To install, simply type:
pip install FireWorks
Note
You may need administrator access, e.g. sudo pip install FireWorks.
Separately, you can download the FireWork tutorial files if you plan on going through the tutorials. You can download these from the FireWorks Github page. All you need is the fw_tutorial directory, but it might be easiest to download the entire source and just copy the fw_tutorial directory somewhere else.
The most comprehensive way to install FireWorks is in ‘developer mode’, which will allow you to easily view and modify the source code and fork the repo for development purposes. However, this method requires setting up an account on GitHub and properly setting up SSH keys.
Install git, if not already packaged with your system. This will allow you to download the latest source code.
Run the following code to download the FireWorks source:
git clone git@github.com:materialsproject/fireworks.git
Note
Make sure you have an account on GitHub set up, and have associated your SSH key on your computer with your GitHub account. Otherwise you might get a cryptic Permission denied (publickey) error. Help on ssh keys can be found here.
Navigate inside the FireWorks directory containing the file setup.py:
cd fireworks
Install the needed dependencies using pip with the following commands (with administrator privileges):
pip install nose
pip install pyyaml
pip install pymongo
pip install django
pip install paramiko
Tip
If you have an old version of these libraries installed, you might need to run pip install --upgrade <PACKAGE>. In particular, ensure that pymongo is >= 2.4.2 and includes MongoClient, and Django is greater than v1.5.
Run the following command (you might need administrator privileges, so pre-pend the word ‘sudo’ as needed):
python setup.py develop
Staying in the directory containing setup.py, run the following command:
python setup.py test
Ideally, a printout should indicate that all tests have passed. If not, you might try to debug based on the error indicated, or you can let us know the problem so we can improve the docs (see Contributing / Contact / Bug Reports).
If you want to update an existing FireWorks installation and used the simple pip install (Method 1), just run:
pip install --upgrade FireWorks
If you installed FireWorks in developer mode:
Navigate inside your FireWorks source directory containing the file setup.py (you can type lpad version to tell you where this is).
Run the following commands:
git pull
python setup.py develop
python setup.py test