Debian and derivatives

The easiest way to install Kwant on a Debian system is using the pre-built packages we provide. We target Debian "stable", but our packages may also work on many other recent Debian-derived distributions as well.

The following instructions will install Kwant on Debian stable "buster". They need to be executed as root.

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

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

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

   apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key C3F147F5980F3535
   

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

3. Update the package data, and install Kwant:

   apt-get update
   apt-get install python3-kwant python-kwant-doc
   

   The python-kwant-doc package is optional and installs the HTML documentation of Kwant in the directory /usr/share/doc/python-kwant-doc.

Ubuntu and derivatives

The easiest way to install Kwant on an Ubuntu system is using the pre-built packages we provide. Execute the following commands in a terminal:

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

This should provide up-to-date Kwant for all recent versions of Ubuntu, up to at least the last LTS version. The HTML documentation will be installed locally in the directory /usr/share/doc/python-kwant-doc.

Debian or Ubuntu: building packages from source

It is straightforward to build Debian/Ubuntu packages from source. This can be useful when the installation from pre-built packages has failed for some reason (e.g. for non-x86 CPUs).

As a prerequisite, a deb-src entry for Kwant is needed in /etc/apt/sources.list. (It will be present if either of the above instructions for Debian or for Ubuntu have been followed.)

FIrst, install the build dependencies (as root):

apt-get build-dep tinyarray kwant

Then, compile Tinyarray and Kwant. This may be done as a normal user.

cd /tmp
apt-get source --compile tinyarray
apt-get source --compile kwant

Finally, install the built packages (again as root):

dpkg --install python3-tinyarray_*.deb
dpkg --install python3-kwant_*.deb python-kwant-doc_*.deb

Arch Linux

Arch install scripts for Kwant are kindly provided by Jörg Behrmann (formerly by Max Schlemmer). To install, follow the Arch User Repository installation instructions. Note that for checking the validity of the package you need to add the key used for signing to your user's keyring via:

gpg --keyserver pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key C3F147F5980F3535

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

Alternative Package

The following instructions explain how to install the official version of Python 3, Kwant, and its dependencies.

1. Determine whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows installation by following these instructions.

2. Download and install Python 3 for the appropriate architecture (32-bit: “x86” or 64-bit: “x86-64”) from the official Python download site for Windows. The current stable version at the time of writing is Python 3.6.

3. Open a command prompt, as described in "How do I get a command prompt" at the Microsoft Windows website.

4. In the command prompt window, execute:

   C:\Python36\python.exe C:\Python36\Tools\Scripts\win_add2path.py
   

   (Instead of typing this command, you can also just copy it from here and paste it into the command prompt window). If you did not use the default location to install Python in step 2, then replace C:\Python36 by the actual location where Python is installed. You may also need to adjust the version (“36” signifies Python 3.6).

5. Reboot your computer.

6. Download the necessary packages (with the ending .whl) for your operating system (32 or 64 bit) and Python version (e.g. cp35 for Python 3.5) from the website of Christoph Gohlke. For Kwant, we recommend to download at least NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, Sympy, MPMath, Pytest, Six, Tinyarray, and Kwant itself. Make sure to put the downloaded files into a directory without any other .whl files.

7. Open a command prompt with administrator rights, as described in “How do I run a command with elevated permissions” at the Microsoft Windows website.

   Go to the directory with the .whl files, e.g.:

   cd c:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\Downloads
   

   To install all the .whl-files in the current directory, execute

   python -c "import pip, glob; pip.main(['install', '--no-deps'] + glob.glob('*.whl'))"
   

   The above cryptic command is equivalent to pip install --no-deps *.whl, i.e. it installs all the wheel files in the current directory using pip. Because the Windows command interpreter does not support globs, we have to rely on the globbing as provided by Python itself.

Now you are done, you can import kwant from within Python scripts.

(Note that many other useful scientific packages are available in Gohlke’s repository. For example, you might want to install IPython and its various dependencies so that you can use the IPython notebook.)

If you do not want to use the Conda packages, you can always install Kwant using pip. Or by directly building from source.

Installing non-Python dependencies

As mentioned above, pip will not install any non-Python dependencies required by Kwant. Kwant has several non-Python dependencies:

• a C compiler (e.g. gcc)
• BLAS
• Lapack
• MUMPS.

If you using a GNU/Linux system then your distribution probably has packages for these libraries; you will need to install the -dev or -devel versions of the packages.

As an example, on a Debian or Ubuntu system, the following command will install the non-Python dependencies of Kwant:

sudo apt-get install build-essential gfortran libopenblas-dev liblapack-dev libmumps-scotch-dev

On Debian or Ubuntu systems the Kwant build scripts should find libraries that have been installed in the above way automatically. This will be signaled at the end of the build process as follows:

******************************** Build summary ********************************
Default LAPACK and BLAS
Auto-configured MUMPS
*******************************************************************************

On other platforms it is possible that MUMPS is not linked against Kwant during installation. If this is the case the build process must be configured manually by writing a build.conf file. You can then tell pip to use this build.conf when installing kwant:

sudo pip install --global-option="--configfile=/path/to/build.conf" kwant