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Installing Qiskit

Requirements

Qiskit supports Python 3.5 or later.

We recommend installing Anaconda, a cross-platform Python distribution for scientific computing. Jupyter Notebook, included in Anaconda, is recommended for interacting with the Qiskit tutorials.

Qiskit is tested and supported on the following 64-bit systems:

  • Ubuntu 16.04 or later
  • macOS 10.12.6 or later
  • Windows 7 or later

Using Qiskit on Windows requires VC++ runtime components. We recommend one of the following:

Note

If you want to contribute to the Qiskit community by developing and contributing code with the most recently updated Qiskit code, see :ref:`Build Qiskit packages from source <install_install_from_source_label>`.

Install

We recommend using Python virtual environments to cleanly separate Qiskit from other applications and improve your experience.

The simplest way to use environments is by using the conda command, included with Anaconda. A Conda environment allows you to specify a specific version of Python and set of libraries. Open a terminal window in the directory where you want to work.

Create a minimal environment with only Python installed in it.

conda create -n name_of_my_env python=3
source activate name_of_my_env

Or, if you're using Windows, use the following command.

activate name_of_my_env

Next, install the Qiskit package, which includes Terra, Aer, Ignis, and Aqua.

pip install qiskit

If the packages installed correctly, you can run conda list to see the active packages in your virtual environment.

Note

During installation, you might see the warning message Failed to build qiskit. This is a non-fatal error that does not affect installation.

There are optional dependencies that are required to use all the visualization functions available in Qiskit. You can install these optional dependencies by with the following command

pip install qiskit-terra[visualization]

After you've installed and verified the Qiskit packages you want to use, import them into your environment with Python to begin working.

import qiskit

Access IBM Q Systems

IBM Q offers several real quantum computers and high-performance classical computing simulators through its quantum cloud services with Qiskit. Follow these steps to setup your Qiskit environment to send jobs to IBM Q systems.

Step 1: Create a free IBM Q Experience account.

Step 2: Navigate to My Account to view your account settings.

Image of where to find the section 'My accounts'.

Step 3: Click on Copy token to copy the token to your clipboard. Temporarily paste this into your favorite text editor for use in step 5.

Image of where to get an API token.

Step 4: Scroll down to the section titled Your accounts. Click on copy url for the account you would like to use. Temporarily paste this url into your favorite text editor for use in step 5.

Image of section 'Your accounts'.

Step 5: Store your API token and url locally for later use in a configuration file called qiskitrc by running the following Python code:

from qiskit import IBMQ
IBMQ.save_account('MY_API_TOKEN', 'MY_URL')

where MY_API_TOKEN and MY_URL should be replaced with the values you set aside in steps 3 and 4.

Refer to :ref:`advanced_use_of_ibm_q_devices_label` for more details, such as how to manage multiple IBM Q account credentials.

Checking Which Version is Installed

Since the Qiskit project is actually a constellation of different elements simply printing the version string can be misleading. When you run

import qiskit
qiskit.__version__

This only gives you the version for the qiskit-terra package. This is because the qiskit namespace in python doesn't come from the qiskit package, but instead is part of the qiskit-terra package.

Instead if you would like to see the version of all the qiskit elements installed in your environment you can use the __qiskit_version attribute. This will return a dictionary of the different qiskit packages and the installed versions. For example, running

import qiskit
qiskit.__qiskit_version__

will return a dictionary like

{'qiskit': '0.10.1',
 'qiskit-terra': '0.8.0',
 'qiskit-ignis': '0.1.1',
 'qiskit-aer': '0.2.0',
 'qiskit-ibmq-provider': '0.2.2',
 'qiskit-aqua': '0.5.0'}

If you're filing an issue or need to share your installed qiskit versions for something you should use the __qiskit_version__ attribute.