Qiskit IBM Provider

Qiskit is an open-source SDK for working with quantum computers at the level of circuits, algorithms, and application modules.

This project contains a provider that allows accessing the IBM Quantum systems and simulators.

Migrating

If you are migrating from qiskit-ibmq-provider please follow the instructions in the migration guide.

Installation

You can install the provider using pip:

pip install qiskit-ibm

Provider Setup

Create an IBM Quantum account or log in to your existing account by visiting the IBM Quantum login page.
Copy (and/or optionally regenerate) your API token from your IBM Quantum account page.
Take your token from step 2, here called MY_API_TOKEN, and save it by calling IBMProvider.save_account():
```
from qiskit_ibm import IBMProvider
IBMProvider.save_account(token='MY_API_TOKEN')
```
The command above stores your credentials locally in a configuration file called qiskitrc. By default, this file is located in $HOME/.qiskit, where $HOME is your home directory. Once saved you can then instantiate the open access provider (hub='ibm-q', group='open', project='main') like below and access the backends:
```
from qiskit_ibm import IBMProvider
provider = IBMProvider()

# display current supported backends
print(provider.backends())

# get IBM's simulator backend
simulator_backend = provider.get_backend('ibmq_qasm_simulator')
```
To see a list of providers available to your account, use the IBMProvider.providers() class method:
```
from qiskit_ibm import IBMProvider
IBMProvider.providers()

# [<IBMProvider(hub='ibm-q', group='open', project='main')>,
#  <IBMProvider(hub='ibm-q', group='test', project='default')>]
```
To access a different provider you can do:
```
from qiskit_ibm import IBMProvider
provider = IBMProvider(hub='ibm-q', group='test', project='default')
```
where hub='ibm-q', group='test', project='default' is a sample premium provider.

Load Account from Environment Variables

Alternatively, the IBM Provider can discover credentials from environment variables:

export QISKIT_IBM_API_TOKEN='MY_API_TOKEN'
export QISKIT_IBM_API_URL='https://auth.quantum-computing.ibm.com/api'
export QISKIT_IBM_HUB='ibm-q'
export QISKIT_IBM_GROUP='test'
export QISKIT_IBM_PROJECT='default'

Then instantiate the provider without any arguments and access the backends:

from qiskit_ibm import IBMProvider
provider = IBMProvider()

Enable Account for Current Session

As another alternative, you can also enable an account just for the current session by instantiating the provider with the token and hub/group/project.

from qiskit_ibm import IBMProvider
provider = IBMProvider(token='MY_API_TOKEN', hub='ibm-q', group='test', project='default')

Contribution Guidelines

If you'd like to contribute to IBM Quantum Provider, please take a look at our contribution guidelines. This project adheres to Qiskit's code of conduct. By participating, you are expect to uphold to this code.

We use GitHub issues for tracking requests and bugs. Please use our slack for discussion and simple questions. To join our Slack community use the invite link at Qiskit.org. For questions that are more suited for a forum we use the Qiskit tag in Stack Exchange.

Next Steps

Now you're set up and ready to check out some of the other examples from our Qiskit Tutorial repository.

Authors and Citation

The Qiskit IBM Quantum Provider is the work of many people who contribute to the project at different levels. If you use Qiskit, please cite as per the included BibTeX file.

License

Apache License 2.0.

mriedem/qiskit-ibm