Tutorial: Spack 101¶
This is an introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented as a hybrid event at CINECA as Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack February 13, 2023. There is a full day of material here, along with extra sections beyond what was presented during the tutorial.
You can use these materials to teach a course on Spack at your own site, or you can just skip ahead and read the live demo scripts to see how Spack is used in practice.
Slides

Full citation: Massimiliano Culpo and Harmen Stoppels. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. CINECA - ADMIRE 2023. Casalecchio di Reno (BO), Italy, February 13, 2023.
Live Demos
We provide scripts that take you step-by-step through basic Spack tasks. They correspond to sections in the slides above.
To run through the scripts, we provide the spack/tutorial container image. You can invoke
$ docker pull ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:cineca23
$ docker run -it ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:cineca23
to start using the container. You should now be ready to run through our demo scripts:
Other sections from past tutorials are also available, although they may not be kept up-to-date as frequently:
Full contents:
Links
Tutorial
- Basic Installation Tutorial
- Environments Tutorial
- Configuration Tutorial
- Package Creation Tutorial
- Mirrors and Binary Caches Tutorial
- Stacks Tutorial
- Developer Workflows Tutorial
- Scripting with Spack
- Module Files Tutorial
- Spack Package Build Systems
- Advanced Topics in Packaging