See also
You will need to understand how to use the terminal.
Note
This section is a short introduction in case you are missing a few software packages, want to try out a cutting edge development version of a software or have no system administrator or software package manager to build and install software for you.
Compiling from Source¶
Don’t be afraid young physicist, self-compiling C/C++ projects is easy, fun and profitable!
Compiling a project from source essentially requires three steps:
- configure the project and find its dependencies
- build the project
- install the project
All of the above steps can be performed without administrative rights (“root” or “superuser”) as long as the install is not targeted at a system directory (such as /usr
) but inside a user-writable directory (such as $HOME
or a project directory).
Preparation¶
In order to compile projects from source, we assume you have individual directories created to store source code, build temporary files and install the projects to:
# source code
mkdir $HOME/src
# temporary build directory
mkdir $HOME/build
# install target for dependencies
mkdir $HOME/lib
Note that on some supercomputing systems, you might need to install the final software outside of your home to make dependencies available during run-time (when the simulation runs). Use a different path for the last directory then.
Step-by-Step¶
Compling can differ in two principle ways: building inside the source directory (“in-source”) and in a temporary directory (“out-of-source”). Modern projects prefer the latter and use a build system such as [CMake]. An example could look like this
# go to an empty, temporary build project
cd $HOME/build
rm -rf ../build/*
# configurate, build and install into $HOME/lib/project
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/lib/project $HOME/src/project_to_compile
make
make install
Often, you want to pass further options to CMake with -DOPTION=VALUE
or modify them interactively with ccmake .
after running the initial cmake command.
The second step which compiles the project can in many cases be parallelized by make -j
.
In the final install step, you might need to prefix it with sudo
in case CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX
is pointing to a system directory.
Some older projects still build in-source and use a build system called autotools. The syntax is still very similar:
# go to the source directory of the project
cd $HOME/src/project_to_compile
# configurate, build and install into $HOME/lib/project
configure --prefix=$HOME/lib/project
make
make install
That’s all! Continue with the following chapter to build our dependencies.
References¶
[CMake] | Kitware Inc. CMake: Cross-platform build management tool, http://cmake.org/ |