Installation

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Unpack and Configure

Installation instructions for pre-built binaries for macOS, Windows, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8 are below. For other platforms, you will need to build Dakota from source using the instructions in our User’s Manual.

  1. Get the Dakota binary package for your platform.
  2. Extract Dakota zip or tar.gz file.
  3. Set environment variables. Optionally, set the PYTHONPATH to use the dakota.interfacing Python module.
Linux

These instructions assume you use the Bash shell.

1. Unpack the Dakota package in the installation location.

tar -xf <package>

2. Edit ~/.bashrc and add the following, replacing $INSTALL_DIR with the location of your Dakota installation.

export PATH=$INSTALL_DIR/bin:$INSTALL_DIR/share/dakota/test:$INSTALL_DIR/gui:$PATH  export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$INSTALL_DIR/share/dakota/Python

3. Restart the shell to make the changes active.

macOS

These instructions assume you use the Bash shell.

1. Unpack the Dakota package in the installation location.

tar -xf <package>

2. Edit ~/.bash_profile and add the following, replacing $INSTALL_DIR with the location of your Dakota installation.

export PATH=$INSTALL_DIR/bin:$INSTALL_DIR/share/dakota/test:$PATH  export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$INSTALL_DIR/share/dakota/Python

3. Recent versions of macOS have security features that prevent Dakota from running without performing one additional step:

xattr -cr $INSTALL_DIR
Windows

1. Unzip the archive and place the folder it contains in the desired installation location. Some versions of Windows have difficulty unpacking Dakota due to the lengths of paths and filenames contained in the archive. Third-party tools such as 7-zip seem to work more consistently.

2. Open the Environment Variables settings.

3. Edit the Path environment variable and add the following paths, separated from any existing paths by a semicolon. Replace %install_dir% with the location of your Dakota installation.

%install_dir%\bin;%install_dir%\share\dakota\test;%install_dir%\gui\

4. Edit (or create) the PYTHONPATH environment variable and add the following path, separated from any existing paths by a semicolon.

%install_dir%\share\dakota\Python

Test

To confirm that the installation is working correctly, perform a few quick "smoke tests"

  • Run dakota -v
  • Start the GUI by running DakotaUI
  • Verify that dakota.interfacing can be imported: python3 -c 'import dakota.interfacing'

What’s Next?

Check out the tutorial in the User’s Manual for your version of Dakota or some of the examples we’ve created.