Installation and running

Before you start…

Helix is installed and run via the command line. You can find the terminal on your computer in the following ways:

On Mac: How to find the terminal on Mac

On Windows: How to find the terminal on Windows

On Linux: Since there are are lots of distributions of Linux, you will have to use a search engine (e.g. Google) or lookup the instructions for your particular distribution.

Installation

Pre-requirements

You will need to install Python 3.11 or 3.12 to use Helix. Make sure you also install pip (The Python package installer). If you don’t already have it installed, get Python.

You may need to make sure you have OpenMP installed on your machine before you can install Helix. In the terminal use the following commands for your OS:

On Mac:

brew install libomp

You may need to try brew3 if brew does not work. Make sure you install Homebrew on your Mac to use the brew/brew3 command.

On Linux (Ubuntu)

sudo apt install libomp-dev

On Windows, this doesn’t seem to be a problem. You should be able to proceed with installation.

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Mac/Linux

# Create a virtual environment with venv
python -m venv <path/to/env>
source <path/to/env>/bin/activate
pip install helix-ai

# -- OR --

# Create a virtual environment with conda
conda create -n <env_name> python=3.11  # or 3.12
conda activate <env_name>
pip install helix-ai

You may need to try python3 and pip3 if python and pip do not work.

Windows

# Create a virtual environment with venv
python -m venv <path\to\env>
<path/to/env>\Scripts\activate
pip install helix-ai

# -- OR --

# Create a virtual environment with conda
conda create -n <env_name> python=3.11 # or 3.12
conda activate <env_name>
pip install helix-ai

Running Helix

Once you have installed Helix, you can run it from the terminal like so:

helix

A browser window will open to the main page of the app.