Conda forge install¶

osx-arm64: missing random number generators

Due to a cross-compiling issue in the conda NEST package, some random number generators are not available if you are using macOS arm64 architecture. The available generators are the Mersenne Twister generators mt19937 and mt19937_64.

Note

If you encounter problems installing the NEST conda package and environment, we recommend using Mamba (https://mamba.readthedocs.io). Mamba has the advantage of installing conda packages and environments more quickly and can be used as a complete drop-in replacement for conda.

To keep your conda setup tidy, we recommend that you install NEST into a separate conda environment together with Python packages that you will use when working with NEST; see also our Tips for installing NEST with conda.

To install the latest version of NEST in a new environment called ENVNAME, just run
```
conda create --name ENVNAME -c conda-forge nest-simulator
```
To install additional packages into the environment, just list them together with nest-simulator.
```
conda create --name ENVNAME -c conda-forge nest-simulator jupyterlab seaborn
```
To see all NEST versions available via conda, either run
```
conda search -c conda-forge nest-simulator
```
or browse the conda forge file list (note there are multiple pages). To install, e.g., NEST 2.18.0, run
```
conda create --name nest_2_18_0 -c conda-forge nest-simulator=2.18.0=*
```
The syntax for this install follows the pattern: nest-simulator=<version>=<build_string>.
Activate your environment:
```
conda activate ENVNAME
```
Note the following:
- We currently provide NEST with thread-based parallelization on conda. This should suffice for most uses on personal computers.