Putting it all together

You should now have your five configuration YAML files in one directory:

• compilers.yaml
• config.yaml
• modules.yaml
• packages.yaml
• upstreams.yaml

This is now your personal "custom configuration scope".

To use it we suggest you request an interactive qlogin session with fairly decent resources:

qlogin -pe smp 8 -l h_rt=24:0:0 -l h_vmem=2G

Once on a compute node, load a Spack module. I will use 0.23.1 as the above configuration files were written for it:

Clear any existing ${HOME}/.spack directory when upgrading Spack

If you have previously followed this tutorial for an older version of Spack such as v0.22.0, you will have an existing hidden ${HOME}/.spack directory containing files linked to it. When moving to a newer version of Spack, you must remove this directory first:

rm -rf ${HOME}/.spack

Once you have upgraded to a new release, it is best to never go back to using an older one.

module load spack/0.23.1

Use the Spack modules

Please try to avoid cloning your own version of Spack from GitHub as per the official Spack documentation. Using a module instead means you will use a version we have tested extensively on Apocrita, which may not be the case when cloning via GitHub. Sometimes configuration options change between versions and adjustments would need to be made.

To use your custom configuration scope, you need to pass the path to it via the -C flag to all Spack commands. For example, assuming you have cloned the spack-config-templates into your home directory:

spack -C ${HOME}/spack-config-templates/0.23.1 find -x -p

That tells Spack to reference your custom configuration scope and merge it with the defaults as appropriate, and then show all explicitly installed packages (-x) along with their location (-p):

$ spack -C ${HOME}/spack-config-templates/0.23.1 find -x -p
-- linux-rocky9-x86_64_v4 / gcc@11.4.1 --------------------------
gcc@12.2.0  /share/apps/rocky9/spack/apps/linux-rocky9-x86_64_v4/gcc-11.4.1/gcc/12.2.0-6frskzg

-- linux-rocky9-x86_64_v4 / gcc@12.2.0 --------------------------
ant@1.10.14                               /share/apps/rocky9/spack/apps/linux-rocky9-x86_64_v4/gcc-12.2.0/ant/1.10.14-gvqgwtj
(etc.)

You'll notice that all listed packages are stored in /share/apps/rocky9/spack/apps/linux-rocky9-x86_64_v4 - this is because they come from the upstreams.yaml file.