Getting Started for Users

Warning

The following guide is for users. If you want to contribute to nectarchain as a developer, see Getting Started For Developers.

Installation

nectarchain is available as a PyPI or conda package, or as a Singularity/Apptainer container as well.

Using conda/mamba

We recommend using the mamba package manager, which is a C++ reimplementation of conda. It can be found here. conda is a package manager, distributed e.g. within Anaconda.

To install nectarchain into an existing conda environment, use:

$ mamba install -c conda-forge nectarchain

You can also directly create a new environment like this (add more packages as you like):

$ mamba create -n nectarchain -c conda-forge nectarchain

To install a specific version of nectarchain, you can use the following command:

$ mamba install -c conda-forge nectarchain=0.1.8

Using pip

nectarchain can also be manually installed as a PyPI package, albeit following specific requirements which are automatically accounted for through a conda/mamba installation.

$ mamba create -n nectarchain python=3.11
$ mamba activate nectarchain
$ pip install nectarchain

To install a specific version of nectarchain, you can use the following command:

$ pip install nectarchain==0.1.8

As an Apptainer container

nectarchain is pushed on each release on the GitHub Container Registry as an Apptainer image. Such a container can be instantiated with:

$ apptainer shell oras://ghcr.io/cta-observatory/nectarchain:latest

The nectarchain code is then available under /opt/cta/nectarchain within the container.

DIRAC support is fully available and configured within such a container.

To use a specific version of nectarchain, you can use the following command:

$ apptainer shell oras://ghcr.io/cta-observatory/nectarchain:0.1.8