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Oqtant Quickstart Guide

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Installation

Oqtant is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux. Below are the steps needed to get Oqtant installed with instructions for each operating system.

1. Install Python

For Python 3.x versions supported by Oqtant, Check the "Programming Language" section of the Oqtant project page.

For a detailed guide on how to install Python for your operating system see: Python Beginners Guide.

2. Create and activate a Virtual Environment

We recommend that you install Oqtant within a Python virtual environment, to avoid conflicts with other Python packages you may have already installed. More information on virtual environments is available on the Python Documentation website.

To create a new virtual environment:

python3 -m venv /path/to/virtual/environment

python3 -m venv /path/to/virtual/environment

python3 -m venv c:\path\to\virtual\environment

To use your virtual environment, you will need to activate it.

source /path/to/virtual/environment/bin/activate

source /path/to/virtual/environment/bin/activate

c:\path\to\virtual\environment\Scripts\Activate.ps1

3. Install pip

If your Python install did not come with pip, you will need to install it.

python -m ensurepip --upgrade

python -m ensurepip --upgrade

py -m ensurepip --upgrade

4. Install Oqtant

pip install oqtant

You can now use Oqtant.

Using Conda

If you are using Anaconda/Miniconda to manage python environments you can follow the steps below:

  1. Create a conda environment to install Oqtant into:
conda create --name oqtant PYTHON=3.10
  1. Activate your virtual environment:
conda activate oqtant

If your conda environment is missing pip you can install it via:

conda install pip
  1. Once activated run the following command to install Oqtant and it's dependencies:
pip install oqtant

Oqtant Jupyter Notebooks

Getting started with Oqtant is easy using the walkthrough and demo notebooks. These notebooks will walk you through the basic functions of using Oqtant to interact with the Oqtant hardware. Feel free to use these as a starting point for your own code: edit, rename, share… they are yours.

Downloading Oqtant Jupyter Notebooks

All our example notebooks are publicly available for download on our GitLab repository., or packaged up into a zip file for easy download here Oqtant Notebooks zip file.

We recommend that you download the notebooks to the same directory as that which includes your virtual environment.

Running Oqtant Jupyter Notebooks

Jupyter notebooks are web applications which run in your browser. Logging requires that you have an active internet connection and have disabled any popup blockers.

With your virtual environment active, Oqtant can be started using the command:

python -m oqtant.start_notebook

This will open a tab in your default web browser with a file explorer type interface.

Next, navigate to "/oqtant_documentation/docs/examples/walkthroughs" and select one to open.

From the "File" menu of the notebook, select "Trust notebook" (this is only needed the first time you run the notebook).

Each notebook is pre-populated with example results that you can view without logging in or using your quota of jobs. You can clear the results by selecting the "Clear", "Cell", "All Output" menu option.

Executable code is located in cells prefaced with In [#]:, with the first cell being In [1]:. To execute a cell, select the cell and then the "Run" menu option.

The first cell of every notebook contains the code to display the login applet. You will need to sign in to be able to run any subsequent cells.

Run the first cell to display the login, click the "Sign In" button and enter your credentials.

Some cells may take some time to run. Running cells will display [*] in place of the cell number.

To stop the notebook, simply close the web browser tab.

For a more detailed explanation of the Oqtant REST API refer to our API Docs.

Troubleshooting

On some system Python installs, you may need to run your commands as python3 instead of python, pip3 instead of pip, and vice-versa.

If you are having issues logging in, you may have more than one Jupyter server running. To check, run the following command:

jupyter notebook list

And to stop one of the servers:

jupyter notebook stop <port number>

Oqtant will not be able to start if you have more than one server running or if port 8888 is unavailable.

  • If you run into ModuleNotFound errors when running cells within the notebooks it can be a sign that the notebooks are not using the correct version of python. To fix this close the notebook server, run the following, then restart the notebooks:
python -m ipykernel install --user

Support

If you run into any issues or simply want to get in touch with us, please visit our Slack site

Alternatively, you can email us at oqtant.infleqtion.com