Linux & Mac OS

The current stable version of SPEX is 3.08.01 and is available for 64-bit Linux systems and Mac OSX. If you are running the older SPEX 3.08.00 version or earlier, we strongly recommend to update! Download the installation files or the tar file below and read the installation instructions below. For more detailed install instructions see our SPEX manual.

Mac OSX

The stable version of SPEX for Mac OSX on Intel processors is 3.08.01, which should work on OSX versions >=12 (Monterey). Please make sure you also have XQuartz version 2.8+ installed on your Mac before you install SPEX. This is the only dependency. 

SPEX 3.08.01 for Macs with Intel processors / OSX 12 and above (.pkg)

SPEX 3.08.00 for Macs with Apple M1/M2/M3 processors / OSX 12 and above (.pkg)

IMPORTANT: After installation, do not forget to source the /opt/spex/spexdist.sh file to set the correct environment before running SPEX. For tcsh users, the file is called /opt/spex/spexdist.csh.

macosx:~> source /opt/spex/spexdist.sh

macosx:~> spex

In addition, it is possible to install SPEX using anaconda. The command is:

conda install spexxray::spex

Linux

We provide an (almost) universal Linux binary for 64-bit Linux systems with glibc versions >=2.31*. If this does not fit your needs, please consider using Docker. To download the Linux binaries, click the download link below:

Download for 64-bit linux (tar.gz)

  • Unpack the tar file in the destination directory (for example ~/software/ or any other directory that you have access to):
    tar xvfz spex-3.08.01-Linux-Intel.tar.gz
    Replace {dist} with the version number. The tar file will create a directory called SPEX-3.08.01-Linux in which the program will be installed.
  • Set the environment variable SPEX90 to the installation directory (for example ~/software/SPEX-3.08.01-Linux):
    export SPEX90=/path/to/your/SPEX-3.08.01-Linux (bash shell)
    setenv SPEX90 /path/to/your/SPEX-3.08.01-Linux (C-type shell)
  • Source the script provided by the distribution:
    source $SPEX90/spexdist.sh (bash shell)
    source $SPEX90/spexdist.csh (C-type shell)
  • Remove the tar file:
    rm spex-3.08.01-Linux-Intel.tar.gz

* Check your glibc version by executing ‘ldd –version’ in a terminal window. 

Source code install

We recommend to use the binary distribution above. However, if these binaries are not compatible with your machine and you do not want to use Docker, then you can compile SPEX from the source code. 

SPEX source code

Instructions for how to compile SPEX are found on our online SPEX manual.

From version 3.05.00 onward, SPEX is distributed under the GPL v3.0 license. See the LICENSE file in the source code package for details.

Older versions of SPEX

Do you want to run an older version of SPEX? Then you can find downloads for Mac and Linux on Zenodo. The oldest version available is 2.00.11. If you have problems running the provided binary distributions, then please consider using Docker