Installation#

Installation Script#

To install rez, you will need:

  1. Python 3.7 or above. We support 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11. The python interpreter you use to run the install script will be the interpreter used by rez itself.

  2. The source code. You can get it by either cloning the repository with git or downloading it from the latest release. If you download rez from the release page on GitHub, don’t forget to unpack the downloaded archive.

Then from the root directory, run:

]$ python ./install.py

This installs rez to /opt/rez. Use install.py -h to see the different install options.

Once the installation is complete, a message tells you how to run it:

SUCCESS! To activate Rez, add the following path to $PATH:
/opt/rez/bin/rez

You may also want to source the completion script (for bash):
source /opt/rez/completion/complete.sh

Warning

Do not move the installation. Re-install to a new location if you want to change the install path. If you want to install rez for multiple operating systems, perform separate installs for each of those systems.

Installation via pip#

It is possible to install rez with pip, like so:

]$ pip install rez

However, this comes with a caveat. Rez command line tools are not guaranteed to work correctly once inside a rez environment (ie after using the rez-env command). The reasons are given in the next section.

Pip installation is adequate however, if all you require is the rez API, or you don’t require its command line tools to be available within a resolved environment.

Note

that running pip-installed rez command line tools will print a warning like so:

Pip-based rez installation detected. Please be aware that rez command line tools
are not guaranteed to function correctly in this case. See :ref:`why-not-pip-for-production`
for further details.

Why Not Pip For Production?#

Rez is not a normal python package. Although it can successfully be installed using standard mechanisms such as pip, this comes with a number of caveats. Specifically:

  • When within a rez environment (ie after using the rez-env command), the rez command line tools are not guaranteed to function correctly;

  • When within a rez environment, other packages’ tools (that were also installed with pip) remain visible, but are not guaranteed to work.

When you enter a rez environment, the rez packages in the resolve configure that environment as they see fit. For example, it is not uncommon for a python package to append to PYTHONPATH. Environment variables such as PYTHONPATH affect the behaviour of tools, including rez itself, and this can cause it to crash or behave abnormally.

When you use the install.py script to install rez, some extra steps are taken to avoid this problem. Specifically:

  • Rez is installed into a virtualenv so that it operates standalone;

  • The rez tools are shebanged with python -E, in order to protect them from environment variables that affect python’s behaviour;

  • The rez tools are stored in their own directory, so that other unrelated tools are not visible.

Due to the way standard wheel-based python installations work, it simply is not possible to perform these extra steps without using a custom installation script. Wheels do not give the opportunity to run post-installation code. Neither do they provide functionality for specifying interpreter arguments to be added for any given entry point.