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Installation

Excalibur-tests

Requirements

Python version 3.7 or later is required.

Virtual environments

On most systems, it is recommended to install the package in a virtual environment. For example, using the python3 built-in virtual environment tool venv, create an environment called my_environment with

python3 -m venv ./my_environment

and activate it with

source ./my_environment/bin/activate

Installation

First, clone the git repository

git clone https://github.com/ukri-excalibur/excalibur-tests.git

Install the excalibur-tests package and the necessary dependencies with pip by

pip install -e ./excalibur-tests

Notes

The -e/--editable flag is recommended for two reasons.

  • Spack installs packages in a opt directory under the spack environment. With -e the spack environment remains in your local directory and pip creates symlinks to it. Without -e spack will install packages inside your python environment.
  • For development, the -e flag to pip links the installed package to the files in the local directory, instead of copying, to allow making changes to the installed package.

Note that to use -e with a project configured with a pyproject.toml you need pip version 22 or later.

Spack

The pip install command will install a compatible version of ReFrame from PyPi. However, you will have to manually provide an installation of Spack.

Spack is a package manager specifically designed for HPC facilities. In some HPC facilities there may be already a central Spack installation available. However, the version installed is most likely too old to support all the features used by this package. Therefore we recommend you install the latest version locally, following the instructions below.

Follow the official instructions to install the latest version of Spack (summarised here for convenience, but not guaranteed to be up-to-date):

Installation

Git clone the spack repository 

git clone -c feature.manyFiles=true https://github.com/spack/spack.git
Run spack setup script 
source ./spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh
Check spack is in $PATH, for example 
spack --version

Version

We recommend using the latest spack version (develop). Stable spack releases starting from v0.20.0 are supported. Older versions of spack may work but are not regularly tested.

Notes

Note: if you have already installed spack locally and you want to upgrade to a newer version, you might first have to clear the cache to avoid conflicts: spack clean -m

It is recommended to always have the python virtual environment active when working with excalibur-tests. However, it should be noted that since Spack is not installed via pip, it will be installed outside of the python virtual environment. Also, keep in mind that the Spack environments that are discussed in the next section are different and independent of the python virtual environment.