Installation Instructions
This section of the CLOVER-GUI user guide aims to guide you through to process of installing the CLOVER-GUI application on your local machine. Currently, CLOVER-GUI comes as a Python package. To install and run the GUI requires an installation of Python 3.10 or newer on your computer. Before you can run the GUI, you need to have installed Python on your machine. If you have done so, you can skip to the Downloading the GUI section.
If you already have anaconda installed, you can use this to install the GUI. If you haven't already got the Anaconda navigator installed, it's best if you install the GUI by installing Python directly. Otherwise, you can follow the instructions to install the GUI with Anaconda.
Anaconda is a Python-environment manager. What this means, in practice, is that it provides an easy way to install the necessary bits and add-ons for Python so that you can run the CLOVER GUI without needing to bother with installing multiple programs or packages on your system. The download page for Anaconda is shown in Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1. The download page for the Anaconda Python environment manager. From here, you can select the download link for your operating system.
Once you've downloaded and installed Anaconda, depending on your system, you need to install the clover-gui package. First, you'll need to create an environment running Python 3.10 or later. The Anaconda pages provide a good user guide for how to create and manage the various Python environments that you have on your system. The GUI will have come with an environment called base, but you'll want to create one which uses Python 3.10 or later. In the Creating a new environment step, you'll want to make sure that the Python box is checked and that the version in the dropdown menu is 3.10 or later.
Now, to install the GUI package. Depending on your system, you'll either have PowerShell (on Windows) or the Terminal (on Linux or on Mac OSX) listed within programs that you can launch through Anaconda. Launching these will open a command-line interface (CLI).
Command-line interface: A text-based way of interacting with your computer. Usually, you interact graphically using applications and windows. With a command-line interface (CLI), you type in text to execute commands like moving files around or installing or running programs.
Make sure that you're in the right environment (i.e., one with Python 3.10 or later) before you launch your CLI application. Once opened, you need to tell Python to install the GUI:
python -m pip install clover-guiRunning this code will cause a large amount of output to be displayed. If prompted whether you wish to proceed, you should select Y (or yes) to continue with the installation of the GUI package.
Navigating to the download page for Python reveals a long list of options. For now, you simply need to ensure that you have Python 3.10 or later installed. In Figure 2.2, you can see that the default version for downloading Python (the newest version available) is Python 3.12. This will be fine for our purposes, though, if you are experienced with handling multiple Python versions, you can choose to use Python 3.10.
Figure 2.2. The Python download page with the various download options. Depending on your computer/s operating system, you should select the download that is most appropriate for you use-case. The CLOVER-GUI package requires Python 3.10 or newer. Pictured, Python 3.12.0 is the default download as this is the newest release of Python available. Image captured October 20th, 2023.
Once you've installed Python 3.10, you'll need to run Python. Either launch command prompt (on Windows), Terminal (on Linux or Mac OSX) to generate a CLI. From here, you can run the command as above:
python -m pip install clover-guiThis will install the CLOVER-GUI python package on your system.
Once installed, you need to run the GUI in the same way that you installed it, namely, by running a command within the terminal that you use to launch Python:
python -m clover_guiThis should load up the graphical user interface for CLOVER! 🎉
If you encounter any difficulties, please get in touch with the CLOVER development team. We're working to bring out a version which is much simpler to install, but, until then, it requires the installation of Python or Anaconda as described in these pages.