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Table of Contents

Local Configuration

Once you have Qiskit installed and running there are some optional configuration steps you can take to change the default behavior of Qiskit for your specific use case.

User Config File

The main location for local configuration of Qiskit is the user config file. This is an ini format file that can be used to change defaults in Qiskit.

For example:

[default]
circuit_drawer = mpl
circuit_mpl_style = default
circuit_mpl_style_path = ~:~/.qiskit
state_drawer = hinton
transpile_optimization_level = 3
parallel = False
num_processes = 15

By default this file lives in ~/.qiskit/settings.conf but the path used can be overriden with the QISKIT_SETTINGS environment variable. If QISKIT_SETTINGS is set its value will used as the path to the user config file.

Available options:

  • circuit_drawer: This is used to change the default backend for the circuit drawer qiskit.circuit.QuantumCircuit.draw() and qiskit.visualization.circuit_drawer(). It can be set to latex, mpl, text, or latex_source and when the ouptut kwarg is not explicitly set that drawer backend will be used.

  • circuit_mpl_style: This is the default style sheet used for the mpl output backend for the circuit drawer qiskit.circuit.QuantumCircuit.draw() and qiskit.visualization.circuit_drawer(). It can be set to default or bw.

  • circuit_mpl_style_path: This can be used to set the path(s) to have the circuit drawer, qiskit.circuit.QuantumCircuit.draw() or qiskit.visualization.circuit_drawer(), use to look for json style sheets when using the mpl output mode.

  • state_drawer: This is used to change the default backend for the state visualization draw methods qiskit.quantum_info.Statevector.draw() and qiskit.quantum_info.DensityMatrix.draw(). It can be set to repr, text’, latex, latex_source, qsphere, hinton, or bloch bloch and when the output kwarg is not explicitly set on the draw() method that output method will be used.

  • transpile_optimization_level: This takes an integer between 0-3 and is used to change the default optimization level for transpile() and execute().

  • parallel: This option takes a boolean value (either True or False) and is used to configure whether Python multiprocessing is enabled for operations that support running in parallel (for example transpilation of multiple QuantumCircuit objects). The default setting in the user config file can be overriden by the QISKIT_PARALLEL environment variable.

  • num_processes: This option takes an integer value (> 0) that is used to specify the maximum number of parallel processes to launch for parallel operations if parallel execution is enabled. The default setting in the user config file can be overriden by the QISKIT_NUM_PROCS environment variable.

Environment Variables

There are also a few environment variables that can be set to alter the default behavior of Qiskit.

  • QISKIT_PARALLEL: if this variable is set to TRUE it will enable the use of Python multiprocessing to parallelize certain operations (for example transpilation over multiple circuits) in Qiskit Terra.

  • QISKIT_NUM_PROCS: Specifies the maximum number of parallel processes to launch for parallel operations if parallel execution is enabled. It takes an integer > 0 as the expected value.

  • RAYON_NUM_THREADS: Specifies the number of threads to run multithreaded operations in Qiskit Terra. By default this multithreaded code will launch a thread for each logical CPU, if you’d like to adjust the number of threads Qiskit will use you can set this to an integer value. For example, setting RAYON_NUM_THREADS=4 will only launch 4 threads for multithreaded functions.

  • QISKIT_FORCE_THREADS: Specify that multithreaded code should always execute in multiple threads. By default if you’re running multithreaded code in a section of Qiskit that is already running in parallel processes Qiskit will not launch multiple threads and instead execute that function serially. This is done to avoid potentially overloading limited CPU resources. However, if you would like to force the use of multiple threads even when in a multiprocess context you can set QISKIT_FORCE_THREADS=TRUE to do this.

  • QISKIT_IBMQ_PROVIDER_LOG_LEVEL: Specifies the log level to use, for the qiskit-ibmq-provider modules. If an invalid level is set, the log level defaults to WARNING. The valid log levels are DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and CRITICAL (case-insensitive). If the environment variable is not set, then the parent logger’s level is used, which also defaults to WARNING.

  • QISKIT_IBMQ_PROVIDER_LOG_FILE: Specifies the name of the log file to use from log messages originating from qiskit-ibmq-provider. If specified, messages will be logged to the file only. Otherwise messages will be logged to the standard error (usually the screen).

  • QISKIT_AQUA_MAX_GATES_PER_JOB: An optional parameter to set a threshold for splitting Aqua generated circuits up into multiple jobs submitted to a backend based on the number of gates.