Installation of IBL Unified Environment

To facilitate the use of ibllib and IBL-pipeline, we have compiled all the dependencies into a unified python environment iblenv. In addition to these two libraries, this environment is also compatible with other visualisation tools and analysis pipelines being developed as part of the IBL.

To use IBL data you will need a python environment with python >= 3.10, although Python 3.13 is recommended. To create a new environment from scratch you can install either uv/pip or anaconda and follow the instructions below to create a new python environment (more information can also be found here)

Please follow the installation instructions below for your favourite package manager.

UV / pip instructions

Run the following commands in your terminal:

uv venv --python 3.13

Make sure to always activate this environment before installing or working with the IBL data

source .venv/bin/activate

Install required packages to access the data

uv pip install ONE-api
uv pip install ibllib

Conda instructions

Install

In your git terminal, navigate to the directory in which you want to install the IBL repositories (e.g. create a folder named something like int-brain-lab and work from within it). Then run the following commands:

conda update -n base -c defaults conda
conda create --name ibl python=3.13 --yes
conda activate ibl

pip install ONE-api
pip install ibllib

Removing an old installation

The following command will completely remove an anaconda environment and all of its packages: conda remove --name ibl --all