# Installing rdkit

## post by ThetaPhiPsi on May 18, 2021
Just for the record, I am working on a cloud GPU instance and want to install rdkit for molecular computations.

But this isn’t so easy as one can see here: [Installation — The RDKit 2023.09.2 documentation](https://www.rdkit.org/docs/Install.html)

I can’t install it via

> pip install rdkit

and there’s no conda available (which I could install afaik know), but even the Ubuntu packages are not available on my instance server:

> $ sudo apt-get install python-rdkit librdkit1 rdkit-data

Any ideas?

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## post by sdbrown on Jun 15, 2021
It’s not too hard to build RDKit from source pulled from github, and then add it to a venv. The RDKit [build instructions](https://www.rdkit.org/docs/Install.html#building-from-source) are pretty decent, and only requires specifying the “alternate” build/install locations e.g. `cmake -D PYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/python3.6/config/libpython3.6.a -D PYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python3.6/ -D PYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 ..`

I had to go through a couple iterations, but in the end I had it working in an otherwise pip-controlled environment without headache.

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## post by ThetaPhiPsi on Jun 16, 2021
Thank you, I’ll try that next time.

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## post by gonzcolm on Jun 23, 2021
Why don’t you just install conda/miniconda in your lambda workstation and then rdkit in a conda environment?

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## post by ThetaPhiPsi on Jun 30, 2021
I needed a quick solution back then and outsourced all rdkit parts to my laptop. This was possible as there were only pre- and post-processing steps using rdkit.

Thanks for the suggestion though.