HashStack is a collection of software profiles that builds on various architectures (Linux, Windows, Mac, clusters, ...) and allows optional reuse of system-wide packages (compilers, LAPACK, Python, ...).
To build these profiles, you need the hit tool from HashDist. Read hit's documentation about how to use it.
Make sure the hit tool is in your path. For example if your ~/bin directory is in $PATH, you can do:
cd repos
git clone https://github.com/hashdist/hashdist
cd ~/bin
ln -s ~/repos/hashdist/bin/hit .
or you can execute in the hashdist directory: export PATH=`pwd`/bin:$PATH (but then you need to put this commnand somewhere in your .bashrc or reexecute it by hand each time).
Now you can initialize HashDist with the following command:
hit init-home
This will install one particular profile:
git clone https://github.com/hashdist/hashstack
cd hashstack
cp cloud.sagemath.yaml default.yaml
hit build
You can now for example run the IPython Notebook as follows:
./default/bin/ipython notebook