Boltz install fails on Windows because git is not available

[goddard@…]

The following bug report has been submitted:
Platform:        Windows-10-10.0.26100
ChimeraX Version: 1.11.dev202509222252 (2025-09-22 22:52:07 UTC)
Description
Boltz will not install on Windows without git because it is trying to pip install from the RBVI github repository.

Log:
You can double click a model's Name or ID in the model panel to edit those
fields  
UCSF ChimeraX version: 1.11.dev202509222252 (2025-09-22)  
© 2016-2025 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.  
How to cite UCSF ChimeraX  

> ui tool show Boltz

> boltz install C:\Users\goddard/boltz22

Successfully created Boltz Python virtual environment
C:\Users\goddard/boltz22.  
Now installing machine learning package torch.  
C:\Users\goddard/boltz22\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install torch --index-url
https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126  
Looking in indexes: https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126  
  
Collecting torch  
  
Downloading
https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126/torch-2.8.0%2Bcu126-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl.metadata
(29 kB)  
  
Requirement already satisfied: filelock in c:\program files\chimerax-
sep-23-2025\bin\lib\site-packages (from torch) (3.19.1)  
  
Requirement already satisfied: typing-extensions>=4.10.0 in c:\program
files\chimerax-sep-23-2025\bin\lib\site-packages (from torch) (4.15.0)  
  
Collecting sympy>=1.13.3 (from torch)  
  
Downloading https://download.pytorch.org/whl/sympy-1.13.3-py3-none-
any.whl.metadata (12 kB)  
  
Requirement already satisfied: networkx in c:\program files\chimerax-
sep-23-2025\bin\lib\site-packages (from torch) (3.3)  
  
Requirement already satisfied: jinja2 in c:\program files\chimerax-
sep-23-2025\bin\lib\site-packages (from torch) (3.1.6)  
  
Collecting fsspec (from torch)  
  
Downloading https://download.pytorch.org/whl/fsspec-2024.6.1-py3-none-
any.whl.metadata (11 kB)  
  
Collecting mpmath<1.4,>=1.1.0 (from sympy>=1.13.3->torch)  
  
Downloading https://download.pytorch.org/whl/mpmath-1.3.0-py3-none-any.whl
(536 kB)  
  
\------------------------------------- 536.2/536.2 kB 35.1 MB/s eta 0:00:00  
  
Requirement already satisfied: MarkupSafe>=2.0 in c:\program files\chimerax-
sep-23-2025\bin\lib\site-packages (from jinja2->torch) (3.0.2)  
  
Downloading
https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu126/torch-2.8.0%2Bcu126-cp311-cp311-win_amd64.whl
(2915.5 MB)  
  
\---------------------------------------- 2.9/2.9 GB 3.8 MB/s eta 0:00:00  
  
Downloading https://download.pytorch.org/whl/sympy-1.13.3-py3-none-any.whl
(6.2 MB)  
  
\---------------------------------------- 6.2/6.2 MB 65.7 MB/s eta 0:00:00  
  
Downloading https://download.pytorch.org/whl/fsspec-2024.6.1-py3-none-any.whl
(177 kB)  
  
\--------------------------------------- 177.6/177.6 kB 10.5 MB/s eta 0:00:00  
  
Installing collected packages: mpmath, sympy, fsspec, torch  
  
Successfully installed fsspec-2024.6.1 mpmath-1.3.0 sympy-1.13.3
torch-2.8.0+cu126  
  
Successfully installed torch.  
Now installing Boltz and required packages from PyPi. This may take tens of of
minutes since Boltz uses many other packages totaling about 1 Gbyte of disk
space including torch, scipy, rdkit, llvmlite, sympy, pandas, numpy, wandb,
numba...  
C:\Users\goddard/boltz22\Scripts\python.exe -m pip install
git+https://github.com/RBVI/boltz@chimerax_boltz22  
Collecting git+https://github.com/RBVI/boltz@chimerax_boltz22  
  
Cloning https://github.com/RBVI/boltz (to revision chimerax_boltz22) to
c:\users\goddard\appdata\local\temp\pip-req-build-t2xjbsky  
  
ERROR: Error [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified while
executing command git version  
  
ERROR: Cannot find command 'git' - do you have 'git' installed and in your
PATH?  
  
  
  
[notice] A new release of pip is available: 24.0 -> 25.2  
  
[notice] To update, run: C:\Users\goddard\boltz22\Scripts\python.exe -m pip
install --upgrade pip  
  
Boltz installation failed. See ChimeraX Log for details.  




OpenGL version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 576.83
OpenGL renderer: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070/PCIe/SSE2
OpenGL vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Python: 3.11.9
Locale: en_US.cp1252
Qt version: PyQt6 6.9.1, Qt 6.9.0
Qt runtime version: 6.9.2
Qt platform: windows

Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Model: OptiPlex 7000
OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro (Build 26100)
Memory: 68,393,086,976
MaxProcessMemory: 137,438,953,344
CPU: 20 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K
OSLanguage: en-US

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[Tom Goddard]

Not sure how anyone has managed to install Boltz from ChimeraX on Windows. By default git is not installed on windows 10 or 11. Possibly if you have visual studio installed it will be present, but I imagine there are relative few users with that.

I saw this problem and made a ticket for it before. Not sure how I managed to ignore it. Maybe there is a solution of getting a github release tar ball for pip to install.

[Tom Goddard]

Fixed in Sept 24, 2025 daily build.

Can pip install from github using an automatically created .zip archive of the branch using

pip install ​https://github.com/RBVI/boltz/archive/chimerax_boltz22.zip

Tested on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is also supposed to be faster than using "pip install git+https://..." because it avoids the git clone.