With Miniforge installed in your home directory, initialize it so that it can be used in other terminal windows:
PATH=$HOME/miniforge/bin:$PATH conda init --all
Next, close the terminal window that was used to run the command above and open a new one. In the new terminal window, you should see your prompt prefixed with (base). This indicates you are in the base environment, and that Conda is ready for operation.
In this new terminal window, update the base Conda environment:
conda update --all --yes
Lastly, add INL's public channel to gain access to INL's Conda package library:
conda config --add channels https://conda.software.inl.gov/public
Create Environment
After installing Miniforge (by following the instructions immediately above), a unique Conda environment will be created named moose with the packages that contain the environment:
conda create -n moose-dev moose-dev=2026.05.08=mpich
If you are running into errors, please see our troubleshooting guide for Conda.
Activate Environment
Now that the moose-dev Conda environment has been installed, run the following to activate it:
conda activate moose-dev
To utilize this environment in other terminal windows, the command above must be ran first. Once this activation command is ran, the compilers and dependencies for building MOOSE or a MOOSE-based application will be available.
Build and Test
After following the instructions above to setup the environment, we will next build and test MOOSE or a MOOSE-based application.
All of the commands that follow must be ran within a terminal window in which you have ran conda activate moose first as described in Activate Environment.
Follow the instructions in Build and Test: MOOSE if you are building MOOSE. Otherwise, follow the instructions in Build and Test: MOOSE Application.
Build and Test: MOOSE
In this example, we will test the MOOSE framework. You should run this example if you are using this development environment to develop MOOSE itself. Here, we assume that a MOOSE repository is available within ~/projects/moose. If you have cloned MOOSE in a different location, you should replace the directory in the first command that follows with the directory in which MOOSE is cloned.
cd ~/projects/moose
cd test
make -j 4
./run_tests -j 4
The above will compile the MOOSE test application and run the tests.
You can also build and test the MOOSE combined application (which contains all of the physics modules) if you wish with the following:
cd ~/projects/moose/modules
make -j 4
./run_tests -j 4
Build and Test: MOOSE Application
In this example, we will test building and running tests for a MOOSE-based application. You should run this example if you are using this development environment to develop a MOOSE-based application.
Run the following, replacing the directory in the first command (/path/to/app) to the directory that your MOOSE-based application is cloned to:
cd /path/to/app
make -j 4
./run_tests -j 4
The above will compile the MOOSE-based application and run its tests.