Installation

There are two ways to install NiBabies: - using container technologies; or - within a manually prepared environment, also known as bare-metal.

Container Installation

Given its extensive dependencies, the easiest way to get up and running with NiBabies is by using a container service, such as Docker or Apptainer.

Working with Docker

Images are hosted on our Docker Hub. To pull an image, the specific version tag must be specified in order to pull the images. For example, to pull the first release in the 24.0.0 series, you can do:

docker pull nipreps/nibabies:24.0.0

There are also a few keyword tags, latest and unstable, that serve as special pointers. latest points to the latest release (excluding any betas or release candidates). unstable points to the most recent developmental change, and should only be used to test new features or fixes.

Tip

latest will pull the most recent release, but beware that it will not be updated until calling the docker pull command again. For this reason, it is recommended to pull using the explicit version tag.

Working with Apptainer (formerly Singularity)

Visit the apptainer containers page, courtesy of DataLad and ReproNim, to download already created images.

Tip

Images are listed as bids-nibabies--<version>.sing, where <version> is the release tag.

Otherwise, you can create an Apptainer image from the Docker images hosted online.

apptainer build nibabies-24.0.0.sif docker://nipreps/nibabies:24.0.0

Installing the nibabies-wrapper

The nibabies-wrapper is a lightweight Python tool to facilitate running nibabies within a container service. To install or upgrade to the current release:

pip install --update nibabies-wrapper

For further details, see Using the nibabies wrapper.

Bare-metal Installation

If you would prefer to install this tool natively, you can refer the Dockerfile as a guide for all the dependencies.