Installation

Requirements

Labrat requires Python 3.10 or later and pip.

Install from PyPI

pip install pylabrat

An isolated environment keeps Labrat and its dependencies separate from the system Python installation:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
python -m pip install pylabrat

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/sdhutchins/labrat.git
cd labrat
pip install .

Use an editable installation while developing Labrat:

pip install -e .

Verify the installation

labrat --help
labrat query --help

Confirm that the Python package is available in the same environment:

python -c "import labrat; print(labrat.__file__)"

Local state

Project and file-management features use ~/.labrat/ for configuration and logs. The project manager creates ~/.labrat/config.json when it first needs the project list.

Build the documentation

Great Docs requires Python 3.11 or later and a separate Quarto installation. Install the documentation dependencies and build the site from the repository root:

pip install -e ".[docs]"
great-docs build

The generated site is written to great-docs/_site/. Preview it locally with:

great-docs preview

The source pages live in docs/. Great Docs regenerates great-docs/ during each build, and the directory remains outside version control.