For this lesson, in addition to having Popper (last section on this page), you need to have Bash, Git, Python, Docker installed on your system. If you have completed the Software Carpentry lesson for any of these, you do not need to do the setup again. If you have not installed one or more of these, you will find instructions on how to do so below.

Bash

Bash is a commonly-used shell that gives you the power to do simple tasks more quickly.

Windows

If you are on Windows 10, we highly recommend to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which will give you a full Linux environment. On older versions of Windows, we recommend you download and install a linux xterm emulator such as MobaXterm or Cygwin to use with Git and Docker. The commands in this lesson assume a POSIX-compliant Unix, so having an emulator will allow for a better learning experience.

macOS

The default shell in all versions of macOS is Bash, so no need to install anything. You access Bash from the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities). See the Git installation video tutorial for an example on how to open the Terminal. You may want to keep Terminal in your dock for this workshop.

Linux

The default shell is usually Bash, but if your machine is set up differently you can run it by opening a terminal and typing bash. There is no need to install anything.

Git

Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes to what (and when) and has options for easily updating a shared or public version of your code on GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab.

For this lesson, you will need an account at GitHub for parts of this lesson. Basic GitHub accounts are free. We encourage you to create a GitHub account if you don’t have one already. You will need a supported web browser in order to use the web interface of these services (current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or Internet Explorer version 9 or above).

For students, GitHub offers the Student Developer Pack which offers free access to some developer tools and services that you would otherwise need to pay for.

macOS

For OS X 10.9 and higher, install Git for Mac by downloading and running the most recent installer from this list. After installing Git, there will not be anything in your /Applications folder, as Git is a command line program.

Alternatively, you can use homebrew to install Git and many other packages.

Linux

If Git is not already available on your machine you can try to install it via your distro’s package manager. For Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install git and for Fedora run sudo dnf install git.

Windows

Git packages are available for unix terminal emulators such as cygwin. If you installed the Linux subsystem, then you can use the package manager of the corresponding distribution to install it.

Docker

In order to run the examples of this lesson, the Docker container runtime will need to be available on your machine. Please visit https://www.docker.com to download and install the version compatible with your system.

Make sure you can run the hello-world example provided by Docker to confirm your installation was successful. More information about getting started and running hello-world can be found at https://docs.docker.com/get-started.

NOTE: Due to time constraints, we can’t provide Docker installation support. We suggest contacting your system administrator or consulting the Docker documentation and forums if problems are encountered.

Python

Python is a popular language for research computing, and great for general-purpose programming as well. For this lesson, a minimal installation of Python 2.7 is required, which is available by default on macOS and Linux, as well as on unix terminal emulators for Windows such as Cygwin.

Text Editor

When you’re writing code, it’s nice to have a text editor that is optimized for writing code, with features like automatic color-coding of key words. The default text editor on macOS and Linux is usually set to Vim, which is not famous for being intuitive. If you accidentally find yourself stuck in it, try typing the escape key, followed by :q! (colon, lower-case ‘q’, exclamation mark), then hitting Return to return to the shell.

An easier to use editor available on all platforms is nano. It is available by default on macOS and Linux.

Popper

To get started with the CLI tool, please install Popper by following the instructions on this page. Note that we have only thoroughly tested on macOS and Linux. For Windows, we recommend using Popper with the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

To get an overview and list of commands check out the command line help:

popper --help