Optional configuration

Verdi tab-completion

The verdi command line tool has many commands and options. To simplify its usage, there is a way to enable tab-completion for it in your bash shell. To do so, simply run the following command:

$ verdi completioncommand

and append the result to the activation script of your virtual environment (or to your bash config, e.g. .bashrc). Alternatively, you can accomplish the same by simply adding the following line to the activation script:

eval "$(verdi completioncommand)"

For the changes to apply to your current shell, make sure to source the activation script or .bashrc (depending the approach you chose).

Adding AiiDA to the PATH

If you used a virtual environment for the installation of AiiDA, the required commands such as verdi should have been added automatically to your PATH. Otherwise, you may have to add the install directory of AiiDA manually to your PATH so that the binaries are found.

For Linux systems, the path to add is usually ~/.local/bin:

export PATH=~/.local/bin:${PATH}

For Mac OS X systems, the path to add is usually ~/Library/Python/2.7/bin:

export PATH=~/Library/Python/2.7/bin:${PATH}

To verify if this is the correct path to add, navigate to this location and you should find the executable supervisord, or celeryd, in the directory.

After updating your PATH you can check if it worked in the following way:

  • type verdi on your terminal, and check if the program starts (it should provide a list of valid commands). If it doesn’t, check if you correctly set up the PATH environment variable above.

  • go into your home folder or in another folder different from the AiiDA folder, run python or ipython and try to import a module, e.g. typing:

    import aiida
    

    If the setup is ok, you shouldn’t get any error. If you do get an ImportError instead, check that you are in the correct virtual environment. If you did not install AiiDA within a virtual environment, you will have to set up the PYTHONPATH environment variable in your .bashrc:

    export PYTHONPATH="${PYTHONPATH}:<AiiDA_folder>"
    

Customizing the configuration directory location

By default, the AiiDA configuration is stored in the directory ~/.aiida. This can be changed by setting the AIIDA_PATH environment variable. The value of AIIDA_PATH can be a colon-separated list of paths. For each of the paths in the list, AiiDA will look for a .aiida directory in the given path and all of its parent folders. If no .aiida directory is found, ~/.aiida will be used.

For example, the directory structure in your home might look like this

.
├── .aiida
├── project_a
│   ├── .aiida
│   └── subfolder
└── project_b
    └── .aiida

If you set

export AIIDA_PATH='~/project_a:~/project_b'

the configuration directory used will be ~/project_a/.aiida. The same is true if you set AIIDA_PATH='~/project_a/subdir', because subdir itself does not contain a .aiida folder, so AiiDA will first check its parent directories.

If you set AIIDA_PATH='.', the configuration directory used depends on the current working directory. Inside the project_a and project_b directories, their respective .aiida directory will be used. Outside of these directories, ~/.aiida is used.

An example for when this option might be used is when two different AiiDA versions are used simultaneously. Using two different .aiida directories also allows running two daemon concurrently. Note however that this option does not change the database cluster that is being used. This means that by default you still need to take care that the database names do not clash.

Using AiiDA in Jupyter

Jupyter is an open-source web application that allows you to create in-browser notebooks containing live code, visualizations and formatted text.

Originally born out of the iPython project, it now supports code written in many languages and customized iPython kernels.

If you didn’t already install AiiDA with the [notebook] option (during pip install), run pip install jupyter inside the virtualenv, and then run from within the virtualenv:

$ jupyter notebook

This will open a tab in your browser. Click on New -> Python 2 and type:

import aiida

followed by Shit-Enter. If no exception is thrown, you can use AiiDA in Jupyter.

If you want to set the same environment as in a verdi shell, add the following code in <your.home.folder>/.ipython/profile_default/ipython_config.py:

try:
    import aiida
except ImportError:
    pass
else:
    c = get_config()
    c.InteractiveShellApp.extensions = [
          'aiida.common.ipython.ipython_magics'
    ]

then open a Jupyter notebook as explained above and type in a cell:

%aiida

followed by Shift-Enter. You should receive the message “Loaded AiiDA DB environment.”