Installation Guide

Dependencies

MolMod dependency

MolMod is a Python library used by most Python programs developed at the CMM. It must be installed before QuickFF can be used or installed. Installation and download instructions can be found in the molmod documentation. The instructions below only work if the MolMod package is installed.

Yaff dependency

Yaff is a pythonic force-field (FF) code used at the Center for Molecular Modeling (CMM) to test-drive new FF models. Yaff is required to run QuickFF, the implementation of each force field term is based on the implementation in Yaff. For this version of QuickFF, it is required to install the development version in the master branch of Yaff available at github. It can be installed by cloning the git repository using the git command:

git clone https://github.com/molmod/yaff.git

Alternatively, a zip file can be downloaded from the online repository for the branch master. After extracting the zip file, Yaff can be installed by following the instructions given in the yaff documentation. The instructions below only work if the Yaff package is installed.

External dependencies

Some software packages should be installed before QuickFF can be installed or used. It is recommended to use the software package management of your Linux distribution to install these dependencies.

The following software must be installed:

To run the python tests, it is necessary to install the Nose package. Most Linux distributions can install this software with just a single terminal command.

  • Ubuntu 12.4 and later:

    sudo apt-get install python-numpy python-scipy python-h5py python-matplotlib python-nose

  • Fedora 17 and later:

    sudo yum install numpy scipy h5py python-matplotlib python-nose

Finally, to be able to run QuickFF in parallel on multiple cores, the Python package Scoop needs to be installed. To download and install Scoop (version 0.6.0.final), run the following commands

  • Ubuntu 12.4 and later:

    wget 'https://scoop.googlecode.com/files/scoop-0.6.0.final.tar.gz'
tar -xvzf scoop-0.6.0.final.tar.gz
cd scoop-0.6.0.final
python setup.py install

Downloading QuickFF

Stable release

A stable release of the second generation of QuickFF, which includes all features described on this website, can be downloaded from:

Previous versions available for download can be found below:

Choose a suitable directory, e.g. ~/build, download and unpack the archive:

mkdir -p ~/build
cd ~/build
wget http://users.ugent.be/~lvduyfhu/QuickFF-2.2.1.tar.gz
tar -xvzf QuickFF-2.2.1.tar.gz
cd QuickFF-2.2.1

Latest development version (experts only)

The latest development version of QuickFF can only be downloaded using Git. This also allows you to upload your own changes to QuickFF. Git is free and open-source distributed revision control system to easily handle programming projects shared between several people. Further information about git (including downloads and tutorials) can be found here. The official git URL for QuickFF is http://github.com/molmod/QuickFF . To clone the QuickFF repository, go to your favorite directory for source code, e.g. ~/build, and execute the following commands:

git clone git://github.com/molmod/QuickFF.git quickff
cd quickff

The source code can be updated with the latest patches with the following command:

git pull

This will also update the version history so that the progress can easily be tracked. This version history can be visualized using the gitk program. This program can be downloaded with the following command (Ubuntu):

sudo apt-get install gitk

Once, gitk is installed, the version history can be visualized by going to the directory containing the quickff repository and running the command:

gitk

Installing QuickFF

Once you downloaded the source code and installed all required packages, QuickFF can be installed. To install QuickFF, simply go to the directory in which you downloaded the QuickFF source directory and run the following command:

python setup.py install

After the installation is complete, you can test your installation by running the following commands:

cd test
nosetests

Once all tests are succesfull, you are ready to use QuickFF.