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Using Spack From Your Home Directory

If you want to use different packages than the shared packages, or if you want to test out a package before requesting that it be installed in the shared context, you can also install a different spack to your home directory.

Installing

Installing Spack just requires cloning its git repository:

git clone --depth=2 https://github.com/spack/spack.git ~/spack

You can change ~/spack if you want to install to another location.

Once you have Spack cloned, you can find the activation script in <install location>/share/spack/setup-env.sh That means if you installed spack via the command above, you can activate it with

. ~/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh

Setting an upstream

You can build all of your own dependencies in your home folder, but it can be more expedient to use the pre-build software in the shared spack installation as a starting point. To enable this, you need to set the shared installation directory as an upstream. The easiest way to do this is to run this command with your local spack environment activated:

spack config add upstreams:spack-instance-1:install_tree:/shared/spack/opt/spack

Package repository

As of Spack v1.0.0, package definitions in Spack are separate from the Spack tool itself. This means you can configure a location for package definitions separately from the Spack tool definition. When you create a local spack install, its default behavior is to create a package repository in your home directory under ~/.spack.

Having your own package repository in your home directory allows you to manage your own package definitions, allowing you to edit package specifications to change how applications are configured, or to experiment with the latest versions of software. However, if you don't need or want to do those things, you may want to re-use the package directory used in the global Spack install to save some time and space. If you want to do that, you can run this command:

spack repo set --destination /shared/spack-packages builtin

This will set your currently active Spack installation to use the package repository configured for the global Spack installation.

Adding packages

With a spack installation in your home directory, you can manage your own package installations. You can look for packages with spack list <packagename>, see your installed packages with spack find, and add new packages with spack install <packagename>

When using spack installed to your home directory, make sure that any scripts that reference local packages activate your spack environment, not the shared environment.

For more on managing a Spack installation and Spack environments, see our Spack package management docs.

Further Resources