To use QISKit you'll need to have installed at least Python 3.5 or later and Jupyter Notebooks (recommended for interacting with the tutorials).
For this reason we recommend installing Anaconda 3 python distribution, which already comes with all these dependencies pre-installed.
if you are a Mac OS X user, you will find Xcode useful: https://developer.apple.com/xcode/
if you are willing to contribute to QISKit or just wanted to extend it, you should install Git too: https://git-scm.com/download/.
The fastest way to install QISKit is by using the PIP tool (Python package manager):
pip install qiskit
Other common option is to clone the QISKit SDK repository on your local machine, and change into the cloned directory:
- If you have Git installed, run the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/QISKit/qiskit-sdk-py
cd qiskit-sdk-py
- If you don't have Git installed, click the "Clone or download" button on the QISKit SDK GitHub repo, unzip the file if needed and finally change into the unziped directory.
To use QISKit as standalone library, install all the dependencies:
# Depending on the system and setup, appending "sudo -H" before this command could be needed.
pip install -r requirements.txt
To get the tutorials working set up an Anaconda environment for working with QISKit, and install the required dependencies:
- If running either Linux or Mac OS X with Xcode, simply run the following command:
make env
- If running on Mac OS X without Xcode, run the following set of commands:
conda create -y -n QISKitenv python=3 pip scipy
activate QISKitenv
pip install -r requirements.txt
- If running on Windows, make sure to execute an Anaconda Prompt and run the following command:
.\make env
- Create an IBM Q experience account if you haven't already done so
- Get an API token from the IBM Q experience website under “My Account” > “Personal Access Token”
- You will insert your API token in a file called Qconfig.py. First
copy the default version of this file from the tutorial folder to the
main SDK folder (on Windows, replace
cp
withcopy
):
cp Qconfig.py.default Qconfig.py
- Open your Qconfig.py, remove the
#
from the beginning of the API token line, and copy/paste your API token into the space between the quotation marks on that line. Save and close the file. - If you have access to the IBM Q features, you also need to setup the
values for your hub, group, and project. You can do so by filling the
config
variable with the values you can find on your IBM Q account page.
For example, a valid and fully configured Qconfig.py
file would look like:
APItoken = '123456789abc...'
config = {
'url': 'https://quantumexperience.ng.bluemix.net/api',
# The following should only be needed for IBM Q users.
'hub': 'MY_HUB',
'group': 'MY_GROUP',
'project': 'MY_PROJECT'
}
The QISKit project provides you a collection of tutorials in the form of Jupyter
notebooks, which are essentially web pages that contain "cells" of embedded
Python code. To run a cell, click on it and hit Shift+Enter
or use the
toolbar at the top of the page. Any output from a cell is displayed
immediately below it on the page. In most cases, the cells on each page must
be run in sequential order from top to bottom in order to avoid errors. To get
started with the tutorials, follow the instructions below.
- download the tutorials: https://github.com/QISKit/qiskit-tutorial/archive/master.zip
- uncompress the zip file
- in the terminal/command-line and into the folder "qiskit-tutorial-master" execute:
jupyter notebook index.ipynb
Please refer to the qiskit-tutorial repository for further instructions on how to execute them.
If you upgrade the dependencies and get the error below, try the fix shown below the error:
- Depending on the system and setup, appending "sudo -H" before this command could be needed.
pip install -U --no-cache-dir IBMQuantumExperience
- Fix: run the command below
curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -o - | python
For additional troubleshooting tips, see the QISKit troubleshooting page on the project's GitHub wiki