How to install RABIES

Pick the installation route that matches where you will run RABIES.

Container

Recommended. Apptainer on Linux and HPC clusters, Docker elsewhere. All dependencies included.

PyPI

Python package only. You install the non-Python dependencies yourself.

Neurodesk

Browser-based neuroimaging environment. Nothing to install locally.

Install as a container

Containers package the entire computing environment, so you do not install dependencies by hand and the software behaves identically wherever you run it. Apptainer is generally preferred over Docker because it does not require root permissions, which makes it usable on high performance computing clusters.

Install Apptainer or Docker first (Apptainer publishes quick start guidelines), then pull the RABIES image:

apptainer build rabies-latest.sif docker://ghcr.io/cobralab/rabies:latest

This produces a single .sif file containing the whole environment.

docker pull ghcr.io/cobralab/rabies:latest

To pin a version, replace latest with a tag from the list of published images.

Note

Versions prior to 0.5.0 are not on the GitHub container registry. They remain available on Docker Hub.

For the execution syntax once the image is built, see How to handle container syntax.

Install from PyPI

RABIES is published on PyPI:

pip install rabies

Warning

pip install gives you the Python package only. RABIES also calls out to external neuroimaging tools, which are listed in dependencies.txt and which you must install yourself. If you are not prepared to manage those, use a container.

Use RABIES on Neurodesk

RABIES is one of the built-in tools on the Neurodesk platform, a browser-based neuroimaging computing environment with community-maintained prebuilt tools. Nothing is installed on your own machine. See the Neurodesk documentation to get started.