Quickstart

This quickstart section will show you how to run a vantage6 network, comprising of three nodes and a vantage6 hub (consisting of HQ, authentication service, algorithm store and user interface), on your local machine.

Requirements

Make sure you have installed the requirements for vantage6: Python and Kubernetes. These are required for all vantage6 components. Installation instructions are present, for instance, in the hub requirements section.

If you are using Docker Desktop, you can simply switch on Kubernetes. Otherwise, we recommend installing microk8s.

Installation

Create a virtual Python environment. We recommend using uv for package management. You can create and activate a Python environment with:

uv venv --python 3.13
source .venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

Then, install the vantage6 command line interface (CLI) by running:

uv pip install vantage6

Note

While vantage6 5.0.0 has not yet been released, you can install the latest version of the CLI by running:

uv pip install vantage6

Start a local vantage6 network

In the Python environment where you installed the vantage6 package, you can easily set up a local vantage6 network by running the following command:

v6 sandbox new

This will start an interactive dialog that will ask you to provide a name for the network. Note that default settings are used - you can view custom options with v6 sandbox new --help.

The network is automatically started. Using the default settings, this will start up all hub components (HQ, authentication service, algorithm store and user interface) and three nodes. The nodes contain some test data about olympic medal winners. Note also that HQ is coupled automatically to the community algorithm store, thereby making the community algorithms directly available to you in your local setup.

You can now access the user interface by navigating to http://localhost:30760 in your browser and log in with the username admin and password admin. Enjoy!

Note

If you are using Windows or WSL with Docker Desktop to run your sandbox, the sandbox files are stored in a WSL folder. Unfortunately, this folder is deleted when you restart WSL or your machine itself. This means your sandbox will be lost.

Also, it is helpful to install wslview, which allows you to open the browser from WSL. This makes authenticating from the client easier. You can install it with:

sudo apt-get install wslview

Note

If you are using microk8s, we have seen networking issues when you move your machine to a different network, e.g. from home to work. What we found helped is to reset the certificates of your microk8s cluster, so that they no longer depend on an outdated IP address. To do this, run:

microk8s config > ~/.kube/config
kubectl config use-context microk8s
sudo microk8s refresh-certs --cert ca.crt

Stopping the network

Once you are done, you can stop and remove the network by running:

# Stop the network
v6 sandbox stop

# Remove the network permanently (clean up logs, configuration files, etc)
v6 sandbox remove

Note that you after stopping the network, you can always run v6 sandbox start to start the network again (but not if you removed the network!).