Information on Rosetta releases

[j3mdamas]

Hi,

I see a lot of tags on https://github.com/RosettaCommons/rosetta/tags, but none of them are actual releases on https://github.com/RosettaCommons/rosetta/releases. Are all the tags considered releases?
I assume you still advise to install from the weekly releases (last version, 2025.13). If so, what is the meaning of the numbered version 3.14?

One final thing: the source compressed file was reduced to 1/5th of what it used to be last time I installed (2022.11?). Any particular reason? It's just a curiosity 🙂

[roccomoretti]

We don't make releases through the Github release process, as the full Rosetta releases are much too big. The official release bundle is hosted at https://rosettacommons.org/software/download/ instead.

The tags listed are pretty much entirely "releases". That is, they're the state of the code for a particular weekly. However, the intent with tags is not to download them through the https://github.com/RosettaCommons/rosetta/tags interface, but to use them with the git interface. A big reason for this is that Rosetta makes extensive use of git submodules. When you download the code from the tags page, you only get the code in the RosettaCommons/rosetta repo. That's insufficient to build Rosetta, and there's a number of other repositories which also need to be downloaded. (That's the reason for being much smaller -- you're not getting everything).

The numbered releases (e.g. 3.14) are simply weeklies which we've elevated to a more formal status, for people who want a more stable numbering. (e.g. for HPC cluster administrators who want a central install of Rosetta, but don't want to be constantly updating it.) The weeklies certainly give you access to a more up-to-date code, though I will say the pace of development has reduced recently. With the opening of the repository, the role of official weekly releases has become less. (It used to be that the weekly release bundles were the only way external users could get in-development code. Now they can simply clone the repository and check out the relevant code snapshot.) As such, there hasn't been much call to post weekly bundles on https://rosettacommons.org/software/download/, and the process to do that hasn't been updated.

If you're not using any bleeding-edge protocols, downloading and using 3.14 is probably going to work. If you do need the latest protocol, then using git clone to get the repository is the recommended approach.

[j3mdamas]

Thanks for the detailed answer and links. By the way, the "Download release" for comercial users on https://rosettacommons.org/software/download/ is broken, it's an easy fix, but thought I'd mention it.

I am indeed an HPC cluster administrator. I had already looked at https://downloads.rosettacommons.org/software/commercial/ before, and that was also source of my confusion (compare with github), that you now clarified.

Thanks for the hints, I think I'd figure out myself what was missing if I was going to use the source compressed file from the github tags. For us, it would be simpler to get a full source compressed file rather than having to clone the entire repo. Shallow clones, which help in these cases, are awkward when one then wants to checkout a tag that may not exist on the shallow clone.

[j3mdamas]

Hi,

After a --recurse-submodules clone, the local clone is 24 GB. A bit less than half of the space is in .git. I did some combinations of --depth, --filter, and other options, to try to improve the time of download but then the submodules start to get screwed or submodules operations start to not work.

Imagine I want to build from version 2025.13. What would be the recommended steps for creating a build from scratch, in a way that minimizes time and disk space?

Thanks in advance

[roccomoretti]

If you're interested in just getting a snapshot of Rosetta at a particular release tag, first look up the tag for the release you're interested in on https://github.com/RosettaCommons/rosetta/tags

Then you can shallow clone the repo and the submodules with a single command:

git clone --branch v2025.13-dev62150 --depth=1 --recurse-submodules --shallow-submodules git@github.com:RosettaCommons/rosetta.git

(I think the --shallow-submodules might be what you were missing to limit the amount of information which needs to get downloaded.)

It still does take a bit of time to download, and the downloaded size is 21G (of which 5.4G is in .git).

Note that the Rosetta compile process attempts to pull information from git (the official released versions have this edited out), so if you're interested in deleting the .git directory to save space, I'd wait until after you've compiled everything you need.

[j3mdamas]

Thanks, that helps a bit but I think that 21 Gb is still a lot and show the advantage of a compressed download like the releases. We have a good connection and it still takes about 17 minutes with that command.

Yes, I noticed that the .git is needed for compilation, and then I was wondering how the release compressed files work, but I see there's a .release.json file which can be the answer.

We'll move forward with this strategy for now since the users requested the latest release, but it would be good to have a quarterly numbered released on https://downloads.rosettacommons.org/software/commercial/ to facilitate installation on HPC clusters.