Installation

Note

This section is written for ZEN-creator users who want to install and use the package as a ready-to-run tool. If you want to modify the code or contribute changes, see the installation guide for developers for instructions on how to work with the repository as a developer.

ZEN-creator is written in Python and is available as a package. You can install the package via pip in a terminal or command prompt.

We recommend working from a conda environment for the installation. If you have not installed Anaconda, you can download it from the Anaconda website. For the general installer and beginner documentation of Python, please visit Python.org. You can check if you have Anaconda installed by running the following command in a terminal (MacOS)/command prompt (Windows)

conda --version

You can quickly create an environment with the command below. Here, “zen-creator-env” is the name of the newly created environment:

conda create -n zen-creator-env python==3.13

Activate the environment with the following command

conda activate zen-creator-env

Now you can install the zen-creator package with the following command

pip install zen-creator

To test whether the installation was successful, type:

conda list

into the command prompt. This will print a list of all installed packages. You should see zen_creator in the list.

Warning

ZEN-creator currently only supports Python versions 3.11 through 3.13.

Warning

The directory in which you install Anaconda should not contain any blank spaces in its file path. Otherwise, the installation of ZEN-creator might fail.

Activate Conda environment

After installing ZEN-creator, you need to activate the ZEN-creator environment each time you open a new terminal. To activate the environment, type

conda activate zen-creator-env

into the terminal in which you would like to run ZEN-creator. At any time, you can deactivate the environment by typing:

conda deactivate