Tutorial: Spack 101¶
This is an introduction to Spack with lectures and live demos. It was last presented as a virtual event at the 2023 RADIUSS Tutorial Series, August 8-9, 2023. The event was a full-day tutorial spread over two days.
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: Gregory Becker, Richarda Butler, Tamara Dahlgren, and Todd Gamblin. Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack. RADIUSS Tutorial Series 2023. Virtual event. August 8-9, 2023.
Video
The recording of the virtual event is available in two parts:
- Part 1
- Part 2
- 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
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:isc23
$ docker run -it ghcr.io/spack/tutorial:isc23
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