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Installing Software in Environments

Spack environments are conceptually somewhat similar to Python's virtualenv, in that they allow the user to specify which packages should be present in the current shell environment after activation. But they normally share the installation directory of the software with regular Spack installations, and also provide a UNIX-like tree hidden in the environment directory.

We can start by creating an environment:

$ spack env create -d spamhameggs

and then activating it:

$ spack env activate -d spamhameggs

This will make sure that every package is only built once, in the specified version.

All subsequent actions now act on this environment. To leave the environment, use the command despacktivate or spack env deactivate.

First, we add TouchDetector to it:

$ spack add touchdetector

Now we can tell see which software needs to be installed:

$ spack concretize
==> Concretized touchdetector
 -   lhp5vxl  [email protected]%[email protected]~ipo~openmp
…
 -   72bpagc      ^[email protected]%[email protected]~ipo+mpi
 -   axln3ax          ^[email protected]%[email protected]~ipo+mpi
…

Now we can add an already existing source directory for the dependency of mvdtool (if it were not already added as dependency by touchdetector you would have had to still add it maually with: spack add mvdtool):

$ git clone [email protected]:BlueBrain/MVDTool.git
$ spack develop -p ${PWD}/MVDTool --no-clone mvdtool@develop

And after another round of concretization:

$ spack concretize -f
==> Concretized touchdetector
 -   nwzcdxp  [email protected]%[email protected]~ipo~openmp
…
 -   vs2omx5      ^mvdtool@develop%[email protected]~ipo+mpi dev_path=…/MVDTool
 -   axln3ax          ^[email protected]%[email protected]~ipo+mpi
…

We can now install everything together:

$ spack install

Modifying the source of MVDTool and retriggering a build:

$ spack install

Should now rebuild both mvdtool and touchdetector.

Python Packages

You should also be able to install and use Python packages like the above. Re-using the active environment from above, first cleaning it:

$ spack rm touchdetector

Then adding py-mvdtool and telling Spack to use the local sources:

$ spack add py-mvdtool@develop
$ spack develop -p ${PWD}/MVDTool --no-clone py-mvdtool@develop

And install everything:

$ spack install

You may need to "refresh" the environment by deactivating and re-activating (to ensure that any new Python paths are included in the environment):

$ spack env deactivate
$ spack env activate -d spamhameggs

And finally, you should be able to use the Python module without any proper modules loaded:

$ python -c 'import mvdtool; print(mvdtool.__file__)'

Modifying the packages marked as to "develop" will cause spack install to re-install them and their dependencies as well. This should lend itself to a good interactive Python development environment.