Setup instructions¶

Windows¶

Download the proliferate windows CLI.
Extract the downloaded folder somewhere on your computer. For example into your user directory.
Go to https://proliferate.alps.science/admin/api to look up the API key and API secret of your proliferate account.

(If you don’t have a proliferate account yet, you can ceate one here.)
Open the Start Search, type in “env”, and choose “Edit the system environment variables”.
Click the “Environment Variables…” button.

Set the following two User variables:

PROLIFERATE_ACCESS_KEY: <API key from step 3>
PROLIFERATE_SECRET: <API secret from step 3>

Edit the Path variable and add the directory that you extracted in Step 2.

For example, if you extracted the directory into your user directory (and now have a folder proliferate in your user directory, add the following path to the Path variable:
```
%USERPROFILE%\proliferate
```
Click OK to save variables.
Open the Command Prompt. (Open the Start Search, type in “cmd” and choose “Command Prompt”.)

Test if the proliferate CLI has been successfully installed by running the following command: (To run a command, type the command in the Command Prompt window and press the return key.)

proliferate

You should see the following output:

usage: proliferate [-h]
                   {post,posthit,getresults,info,push,update,pull,clone} ...
                   label

Interface with Proliferate.

positional arguments:
  label                 You must have a label that corresponds to the
                        experiment you want to work with.This will be the
                        beginning of the name of the config file (everything
                        before the dot). [label].config.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

subcommands:
  {post,posthit,getresults,info,push,update,pull,clone}
    post (posthit)      post new experiment
    getresults          download results (use --sandbox to download sandbox
                        results.)
    info                display details and status of experiment
    push (update)       update experiment on Proliferate server
    pull                download configuration from Proliferate server
    clone               clone experiment from Proliferate server

Note

You may get one or several notifications from Windows Defender when you first run proliferate. You can safely ignore these notifications.

MacOS¶

Open the Terminal.
Make sure that pip is installed by running pip --version. (To run a command, type the command in the Terminal window and press the return key.)

If you get an error message, make sure that Python 3 and pip are installed. We recommend using the Anaconda Python distribution.
Make sure that Git is installed by running git --version.

If you get an error message, make sure that Git is installed. Look at the git website for instructions on how to install git on MacOS.

Install the command line interface by running the following two commands:

git clone https://github.com/sebschu/proliferate-client
pip install -e proliferate-client

Go to https://proliferate.alps.science/admin/api and click on “Copy environment variables” to copy the environment variables.

(If you don’t have a proliferate account yet, you can ceate one here.)
Open your .bash_profile script:
```
open ~/.bash_profile
```
Paste the environment variables into the end of this file and save it.
Load the environment variables:
```
source ~/.bash_profile
```

Test if the proliferate CLI has been successfully installed:

proliferate

You should see the following output:

usage: proliferate [-h]
                   {post,posthit,getresults,info,push,update,pull,clone} ...
                   label

Interface with Proliferate.

positional arguments:
  label                 You must have a label that corresponds to the
                        experiment you want to work with.This will be the
                        beginning of the name of the config file (everything
                        before the dot). [label].config.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

subcommands:
  {post,posthit,getresults,info,push,update,pull,clone}
    post (posthit)      post new experiment
    getresults          download results (use --sandbox to download sandbox
                        results.)
    info                display details and status of experiment
    push (update)       update experiment on Proliferate server
    pull                download configuration from Proliferate server
    clone               clone experiment from Proliferate server

Linux¶

Open the Terminal.
Make sure that pip is installed by running pip --version. (To run a command, type the command in the Terminal window and press the return key.)

If you get an error message, make sure that Python 3 and pip are installed. We recommend using the Anaconda Python distribution.
Make sure that Git is installed by running git --version.

If you get an error message, make sure that Git is installed. Look at the git website for instructions on how to install git on Linux.

Install the command line interface by running the following two commands:

git clone https://github.com/sebschu/proliferate-client
pip install -e proliferate-client

Go to https://proliferate.alps.science/admin/api and click on “Copy environment variables” to copy the environment variables.

(If you don’t have a proliferate account yet, you can ceate one here.)
Open your .bashrc script with a text editor such as nano: (this is how the file is usually called on Ubuntu and Debian systems; on other distributions this file may have a different name such as ~/.profile)
```
nano ~/.bashrc
```
Paste the environment variables into the end of this file and save it.
Load the environment variables:
```
source ~/.bashrc
```

Test if the proliferate CLI has been successfully installed:

proliferate

You should see the following output:

usage: proliferate [-h]
                   {post,posthit,getresults,info,push,update,pull,clone} ...
                   label

Interface with Proliferate.

positional arguments:
  label                 You must have a label that corresponds to the
                        experiment you want to work with.This will be the
                        beginning of the name of the config file (everything
                        before the dot). [label].config.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

subcommands:
  {post,posthit,getresults,info,push,update,pull,clone}
    post (posthit)      post new experiment
    getresults          download results (use --sandbox to download sandbox
                        results.)
    info                display details and status of experiment
    push (update)       update experiment on Proliferate server
    pull                download configuration from Proliferate server
    clone               clone experiment from Proliferate server