Installing Own Software¶

Users are not limited to the software provided centrally as modules. Own software can be installed in the $HOME directory or a workspace and used alongside the system modules.

Choosing an approach¶

• Self-compiled programs — own or open-source code built with the system compilers; see Compilers and Runtimes and Making programs available in PATH
• Pre-compiled software — binaries, e.g. commercial software; see Making programs available in PATH
• EasyBuild — reproducible builds including automatically generated modules
• Containers — pre-packaged applications with all dependencies
• Python packages — Python libraries and tools

Making programs available in PATH¶

To run an installed program without its full path, the directory containing the executable must be part of the PATH environment variable.

Install the program into ~/.local/bin, which is already part of the PATH. For any other directory, add it to the PATH, e.g. in ~/.bashrc:

export PATH="$HOME/my/bin:$PATH"

In batch jobs, set the PATH in the job script as well, especially with #SBATCH --export=NONE.

Runtime dependencies¶

If a program was built with modules (e.g. compilers or libraries), load the same modules at runtime. The runtime libraries must match the build-time libraries.

Own module files¶

Own installations can be made loadable with module load by providing a module file. See User modules.