Installation guide

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. For more information please refer to Versioning documentation. Later releases provide significantly better support and features.

Install the package

The latest ansys.mechanical.core package supports Python 3.9 through Python 3.12 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 3.9 through Python 3.12. 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 3.9, unzip the wheelhouse archive and install it with this code:

unzip ansys-mechanical-core-v0.11.dev0-wheelhouse-Linux-3.9 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-v0.11.dev0-wheelhouse-Windows-3.9 wheelhouse archive to a wheelhouse directory and then install it using pip as 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. Before running either, you must first verify that you can find the installed version of Mechanical using the ansys.tools.path package. This package is required to use PyMechanical.

>>> from ansys.tools.path import find_mechanical
>>> find_mechanical()

or

>>> find_mechanical(version=231)  # for specific version

('C:/Program Files/ANSYS Inc/v231/aisol/bin/winx64/AnsysWBU.exe', 23.1)  # windows
('/usr/ansys_inc/v231/aisol/.workbench', 23.1) # Linux

If you install Ansys in a directory other than the default or typical location, you can save this directory path using the save_mechanical_path function. Then use get_mechanical_path and version_from_path functions to verify the path and version. For more details, refer to the Ansys path tools.

>>> from ansys.tools.path import save_mechanical_path, find_mechanical
>>> save_mechanical_path("home/username/ansys_inc/v231/aisol/.workbench")
>>> path = get_mechanical_path()
>>> print(path)

/home/username/ansys_inc/v231/aisol/.workbench

>>> version = version_from_path("mechanical", path)

231

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 available to install using pip: pip install ansys-mechanical-env

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

mechanical-env 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:232
Software build date: 05/30/2023 15:25:53