# Installation

We recommend that you install `mdtraj` with `conda`.

    $ conda install -c conda-forge mdtraj

You can install also `mdtraj` with `pip`, if you prefer.

    $ pip install mdtraj

Conda is a cross-platform package manager built especially for scientific python. It will install `mdtraj` along with all dependencies from a pre-compiled binary. If you don’t have Python or the `conda` package manager, we recommend starting with the Anaconda Scientific Python distribution, which comes pre-packaged with many of the core scientific python packages that MDTraj uses (see below), or with the Miniconda Python distribution, which is a bare-bones Python installation.

MDTraj supports Python 2.7 or Python 3.4+ (recommended) on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

## Compiling From Source

To compile MDTraj from source, you should use pip as well:

    git clone https://github.com/mdtraj/mdtraj
    cd mdtraj
    pip install -e .

## Testing Your Installation

Running the tests is a great way to verify that everything is working. The test suite uses pytest, which you can pick up via `pip` if you don’t already have it.

    pip install pytest

Then, to run the tests, execute the commands

    git clone https://github.com/mdtraj/mdtraj.git
    cd mdtraj
    # If using conda, make sure to have your conda environment active
    py.test