1.4. Installation

Tkwant provides conda packages for the installation on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Prebuild packages also exist for GNU/Linux systems as Ubuntu and Debian. Building the package from source for a GNU/Linux system is also described below, but it is needed only for developement.

1.4.1. Conda

Tkwant provides conda packages for GNU/Linux, MacOS and Microsoft Windows on the conda-forge channel. First, the Anaconda Python distribution must be installed. Currently, Python versions of 3.6 and 3.7 are supported for Tkwant. We show here the installation with a virtual environment, in order not to affect already installed packages on conda. Note that once Tkwant is installed, the environment must be activated for each session in order to use Tkwant:

conda activate env-tkwant

Linux and MacOS

Tkwant can be installed with the commands:

conda create -n env-tkwant python=3.7
conda activate env-tkwant
conda install tkwant -c conda-forge

Windows

The package mpi4py, which is required by tkwant, is not provided for Windows by conda-forge and must be installed separately. Tkwant can be installed on a Windows computer with the commands:

conda create -n env-tkwant python=3.7
conda activate env-tkwant
conda install -c intel mpi4py
conda install tkwant -c conda-forge

1.4.2. GNU/Linux

Prebuild packages exist for GNU/Linux systems as Ubuntu and Debian.

Ubuntu and derivatives

Currently only the Ubuntu version 20.04 LTS is supported. Tkwant can be installed with the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository -s ppa:kwant-project/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-tkwant

Debian and derivatives

The installation of Tkwant is quite similar to the installation instructions of Kwant.

  1. Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

    deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stretch-backports main
deb http://downloads.kwant-project.org/debian/ stretch-backports main
deb-src http://downloads.kwant-project.org/debian/ stretch-backports main

  2. (Optional) Add the OpenPGP key used to sign the repositories by executing:

    apt-key adv --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key C3F147F5980F3535

The fingerprint of the key is 5229 9057 FAD7 9965 3C4F 088A C3F1 47F5 980F 3535.

  1. Update the package data, and install Tkwant:

    apt-get update
apt-get -t stretch-backports install python3-tkwant

1.4.3. Installation from source

Installing Tkwant from the official repository or with pip is more involved because Tkwant has several non-Python dependencies and requires a C compiler. It is therefore recommended for advanced users only. As a first step, the required Python and non-Python dependencies, which are listed below, must be installed. In a second step, the Cython modules of Tkwant must be compiled.

Requirements

Building requirements

Tkwant requires several non-Python dependencies:

The non-Python dependencies of Tkwant can be installed with the following command:

sudo apt-add-repository -s ppa:kwant-project/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install build-essential libopenblas-dev librsb-dev libopenmpi-dev python3-kwant

Tkwant requires at least Python 3.4. The following Python packages must be installed to build tkwant:

The following software is recommended, even though not needed to build tkwant:

All Python packages can be installed from the command line by the standard Python package manager pip via:

python3 -m pip install --user cython numpy scipy sympy mpi4py tinyarray kwantspectrum matplotlib

Above pip command can be also used within the Anaconda Python distribution. For version requirements we refer to the requirements section in file setup.py in the project repository.

Tkwant needs additional packages for running tests or to build the documentation. These additional packages are not mandatory for building tkwant however.

Testing requirements

The tkwant test suite requires the following Python packages:

The packages can be installed by the standard pip command:

python3 -m pip install --user pytest

Documentation requirements

Building the documentation requires the following Python packages:

The packages can be installed by the standard pip command:

python3 -m pip install --user sphinx jupyter-sphinx matplotlib

Installing tkwant from source

Tkwant can be installed from the official tkwant git repository or from the standard Python package manager pip. Make sure that all required packages are installed before installing Tkwant. The installation instructions of Kwant apply mostly also to tkwant. To install Tkwant form the official git repository execute:

python3 -m pip install --user git+https://gitlab.kwant-project.org/kwant/tkwant.git

Alternatively install Tkwant using pip with:

python3 -m pip install --user tkwant

Installing tkwant is convenient for users which only like to use the existing tkwant module. If one is interested to also modify or develop the tkwant code, the instructions “Building tkwant for development” described below are more appropriate.

Building tkwant for development

For development, tkwant should first be cloned from the tkwant repository:

git clone https://gitlab.kwant-project.org/kwant/tkwant.git

Then, after cd into the local repository, one can locally build tkwant with the command:

python3 setup.py build_ext -i

Make sure that all required packages are installed before executing above command. In order to have the tkwant module in the Python search path, one can make a symbolic link to the tkwant folder. The following command can be adapted to create the symlink:

mkdir -p ~/.local/lib/python3.X/site-packages/
ln -s ABSOLUTE-PATH-TO-TKWANT-REPO/tkwant ~/.local/lib/python3.X/site-packages/

where python3.X must be replaced by the correct folder name in the Python search path. Note that ../tkwant refers to the directory tkwant located inside the local tkwant repository.