Getting started

To run PyMechanical, you must have a licensed copy of Ansys Mechanical installed locally. The version installed dictates the interface and features that are available to you.

PyMechanical is compatible with Mechanical 2023 R1 and later on Windows and Linux. Later releases provide significantly better support and features.

For more information, see the Ansys Mechanical page on the Ansys website.

Install the package

The ansys.mechanical.core package supports Python 3.8 through Python 3.11 on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

You should consider installing PyMechanical in a virtual environment. For more information, see Python’s venv – Creation of virtual environments.

Install the latest package from PyPi with this command:

pip install ansys-mechanical-core

Install offline

If you want to install PyMechanical on a computer without access to the internet, you can download a wheelhouse archive that corresponds to your machine architecture from the Releases page of the PyMechanical repository.

Each wheelhouse archive contains all the Python wheels necessary to install PyMechanical from scratch on Windows and Linux for Python 3.8 through Python 3.10. You can install a wheelhouse archive on an isolated system with a fresh Python installation or on a virtual environment.

For example, on Linux with Python 3.8, unzip the wheelhouse archive and install it with this code:

unzip ansys-mechanical-core-v0.7.dev0-wheelhouse-Linux-3.8 wheelhouse
pip install ansys-mechanical-core -f wheelhouse --no-index --upgrade --ignore-installed

If you are on Windows with Python 3.9, unzip the ansys-mechanical-core-v0.7.dev0-wheelhouse-Windows-3.9 wheelhouse archive to a wheelhouse directory and then install it using pip like in the preceding example.

Verify your installation

The way that you verify your installation depends on whether you want to run Mechanical using a remote session or an embedded instance.

Verify a remote session

Verify your installation by starting a remote session of Mechanical from Python:

>>> from ansys.mechanical.core import launch_mechanical
>>> mechanical = launch_mechanical()
>>> mechanical

Ansys Mechanical [Ansys Mechanical Enterprise]
Product Version:231
Software build date:Wednesday, August 10, 2022 4:28:15 PM

If you see a response from the server, you can begin using Mechanical as a service. For information on the PyMechanical interface, see PyMechanical usage.

Verify an embedded instance

Verify your installation by loading an embedded instance of Mechanical in Python.

Note

If you are running on Linux, you must set some environment variables for embedding of Mechanical in Python to work. A script that sets these variables is distributed with Mechanical 2023 R2 and later. For 2023 R2, the script is located here:

/path/to/ansys_inc/v232/aisol/.workbench_lite

To use the script, prepend it to any invocation of Python:

/path/to/ansys_inc/v232/aisol/.workbench_lite python

Inside of Python, use the following commands to load an embedded instance:

>>> from ansys.mechanical.core import App
>>> app = App()
>>> print(app)
Ansys Mechanical [Ansys Mechanical Enterprise]
Product Version:231
Software build date:Wednesday, August 10, 2022 4:28:15 PM