Environments

The qBraid Lab Environment Manager is a robust package and virtual environment management system provided to qBraid end-users through a simple, intuitive graphical user interface.

To expand the Environment Manager sidebar, click on Envs in the upper-right of the Lab console. My Environments are your currently installed environments. The qBraid Default environment and Microsoft Q# environment are installed by default.

Have an idea for a new qBraid environment? Or want your own project featured? Fill out our New Environment Request Form.

See also

• Install & manage quantum software in the cloud on qBraid | Demo

Install environment

1. In the Environment Manager sidebar, click Add to view the environments available to install.

2. Choose an environment, expand its pannel, and click Install.

3. Once the installation has started, the pannel is moved to the My Environments tab. Click Browse Environments to return to the My Environments tab and view its progress.

4. When the installation is complete, the environment panel’s action button will switch from Installing… to Activate. Clicking Activate creates a new ipykernel, see Add/remove kernels for more.

To uninstall the environment, click on More, and then Uninstall.

Create environment

1. In the Environment Manager sidebar, click Add, then click New Environment.

2. Give your custom environment a name, description, add tags, upload a logo, and specify any packages to install using a requirements.txt format.

After clicking Create, a new environment panel is created for your custom environment. You can view the environment’s install progress by returning to My Environments.

3. Once the environment has been created and any package installations have finished, the environment panel’s action button will switch from Installing… to Activate, and the installed packages number will be updated.

4. Click on More to verify/view the environment’s list of installed packages. You can use the search bar or scroll through the Python package (pip) list to find the exact versions of all packages and package dependecies that were installed. From the More pop-out, you can also install additional packages, remove packages, add/delete tags, and edit the environment’s description.

Share environment

In qBraid Lab, you can share your custom environments with other users. This will make your environment visible under their Add environment list. They can then install it, and run code using an exact copy of your environment. This includes support for quantum jobs and any additional configurations.

To share a custom environment, first click the More button in the drop-down to open the environment editor. Then, under ‘Share Environment’ , enter the qBraid user email, and click Share.

Install new package

There are three ways to install a new package into an environment on qBraid:

1. Add a package button

Open the Environment Manager (ENVS) sidebar, and find the environment into which you want to install the package. Expand the environment panel using the carrot drop-down, and then click More.

At the bottom of the Python packages list, click Add a package. Type in the exact name of the package you wish to install into the “Add package…” search bar, and then hit Enter (or click the search icon on the right). This will do a direct search through PyPI, and return the latest version available to install. To accept, click on the packge, and then click Add.

While installing, the environment action button will indicate Installing…. Once complete, Lab will send a notification similar to the following:

Note

Currently, the “Add package” feature only supports installing the latest i.e. most up-to-date package version found in PyPI. To install an older version of a package, use either of the two command-based options given below.

2. IPython magic command

From inside a notebook, run your pip command using the “magic” % operator to install the desired package(s) within the current kernel:

%pip install [pkgs]

See also

• IPython Built-in magic commands (pip).

3. Directly from terminal

From Launcher, under “Other”, click on Terminal. By default, your qBraid terminal opens using Python (and pip) from /opt/conda/bin. Packages that are installed directly at this top-level will not persist between sessions. Instead, use the qBraid CLI to list your environments,

$ qbraid envs list
# installed environments:
#
qsharp                         /opt/.qbraid/environments/qsharp_b54crn
default                  jobs  /opt/.qbraid/environments/qbraid_000000
qbraid_sdk               jobs  /home/jovyan/.qbraid/environments/qbraid_sdk_9j9sjy
qiskit                   jobs  /home/jovyan/.qbraid/environments/qiskit_9y9siy

activate an environment, and perform your pip installs from there. For example, installing pytket into the qiskit environment:

$ qbraid envs activate qiskit
$ python -m pip install pytket
$ deactivate

How environments work

qBraid environments are simply Python virtual environments in disguise. There are two directories where qBraid environment can be found. One at the system level, and one at the local / user level:

$ echo $QBRAID_USR_ENVS
/home/jovyan/.qbraid/environments
$ echo $QBRAID_SYS_ENVS
/opt/.qbraid/environments

The environments at the the system level are reset each time you launch Lab, so any changes made to these environments will not persist between sessions. The user level environments are yours to modify: any and all changes you make to these environments will still be there the next time to launch Lab. The qBraid CLI provides convenient short-cuts to activate and install pacakages into your qBraid environments, however all of the traditional commands to activate and manipulate Python venvs still apply. For example, you can activate an environment using the source command:

$ source $QBRAID_USR_ENVS/<slug>/pyenv/bin/activate

If you’re working in terminal, you don’t specifically need to activate a qBraid environment, as you can just specify the full path to that environment’s Python interpreter when invoking Python, e.g. /<path-to-venv>/bin/python. The same is true for pip commands. So if you are attempting to install new packages into a qBraid environment from terminal or inside a notebook, make sure to use the full pip path, or use one of the three approaches detailed above. Simply running pip install ... will default to /opt/conda/bin/pip, which will cause dependency conflicts, and the installed packages will be overridden the next time you launch lab.