Installation

Please note that the CLTK is built, tested, and supported only on POSIX-compliant OS (namely, Linux, Mac and the BSDs).

With Pip

Note

The CLTK is only officially supported with Python 3.7 on POSIX–compliant operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.).

First, you’ll need a working installation of Python 3.7, which now includes Pip. Create a virtual environment and activate it as follows:

$ python3.7 -m venv venv

$ source venv/bin/activate

Then, install the CLTK, which automatically includes all dependencies.

$ pip install cltk

Second, you will need an installation of Git, which the CLTK uses to download and update corpora, if you want to automatically import any of the CLTK’s corpora. Installation of Git will depend on your operating system.

Tip

For a user–friendly interactive shell environment, try IPython, which may be invoked with ipython from the command line. You may install it with pip install ipython.

Microsoft Windows

Warning

CLTK on Windows is not officially supported, however we do encourage Windows 10 users to give the following a try. Others have reported success. If this should fail for you, please open an issue on GitHub.

Windows 10 features a beta of “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows”, which creates a fully functional POSIX environment. For an introduction, see Microsoft’s docs here.

Once you have enabled Bash on Windows, installation and use is just the same as on Ubuntu. For instance, you do use the following:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
sudo apt install python-virtualenv
virtualenv -p python3 ~/venv
source ~/venv/bin/activate
pip3 install cltk

Tip

Some fonts do not render Unicode well in the Bash Terminal. Try SimSub-ExtB or Courier New.

Older releases

For reproduction of scholarship, the CLTK archives past versions of its software releases. To get an older release by version, say v0.1.32, use:

$ pip install cltk==0.1.32

If you do not know a release’s version number but have its DOI (for instance, if you want to install version 10.5281/zenodo.51144), then you can search Zenodo and learn that this DOI corresponds to version v0.1.34.

The above will work for most researchers seeking to reproduce results. It will give you CLTK code identical to what the original researcher was using. However, it is possible that you will want to use the exact same CLTK dependencies the researcher was using, too. In this case, consult the CLTK GitHub Releases page and download a .tar.gz file of the desired version. Then, you may do the following:

$ tar zxvf cltk-0.1.34.tar.gz
$ cd cltk-0.1.34
$ python3.6 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

This will give you CLTK and immediate dependencies identical to your target codebase.

The CLTK’s repositories are versioned, too, using Git. Should there have been changes to a target corpus, you may acquire your needed version by manually cloning the entire repo, then checking out the past version by commit log. For example, if you need commit 0ed43e025df276e95768038eb3692ba155cc78c9 from the repo latin_text_perseus:

$ cd ~/cltk_data/latin/text/
$ rm -rf text/latin_text_perseus/
$ git clone https://github.com/cltk/latin_text_perseus.git
$ cd latin_text_perseus/
$ git checkout 0ed43e025df276e95768038eb3692ba155cc78c9

From source

The CLTK source is available at GitHub. To build from source, clone the repository, make a virtual environment (as above), and run:

$ pip install -U -r requirements.txt
$ python setup.py install

If you have modified the CLTK source, rebuild the project with this same command. If you make any changes, it is a good idea to run the test suite to ensure you did not introduce any breakage. Test with nose:

$ nosetests --with-doctest