Milestone 1
Setting up the build environment
Learning goals
The student will…
- …be able to compile a C++ project with Meson.
- …be able to specify build types of a Meson project.
Introduction
In this first milestone we will set up a build environemnt and make sure that you can compile C++ code on your computer. This will be the starting point for the developments in the following milestones.
Setting up your system
The starting point of your project is setting up a proper build environment. This means, you need to install and test all tools necessary for the project. In particular, you will need:
We provide installation instructions for Ubuntu installations. If you have a Windows machine, we recommend to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Documentation on how to install WSL on Windows 10 can be found here. The following instructions also apply for Ubuntu installed within WSL.
Once you have these things set up, open a command shell and type
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc make meson ninja-build gdb valgrind mpi-default-dev
Note that if you are on a different system than Ubuntu, these commands may differ. On Ubuntu/Debian it is apt or apt-get but on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL the package manager command is dnf. On macOS it depends on which package manager you have installed, the most popular one is Homebrew which provides the brew command for package installation. The names of the packages will also vary between these systems.
We recommend using a development environment for developing code. We ourselves use CLion. Free educational licenses for CLion can be obtained here. CLion is available for all of the above platforms and can on Windows be configured to use WSL. (Documentation on CLion and WSL can be found here.)
Creating an empty repository
The first thing you need to do is to set up your build environment. We have done this for you and provide a template repository here: https://github.com/imtek-simulation/meson-skeleton/. We will now be walking you through the process of obtaining this skeleton repository from the command line. You can also carry out the whole process within CLion.
On Github, you can simply create a new repository from our template. Navigate to the link above and click on “Use this template”. You will be asked for a new name of the repository: Let’s call this yamd (Yet Another Molecular Dynamics code). Since my username is “pastewka”, the repository now resides under
https://github.com/pastewka/yamd
You can now check this repository out, i.e. copy it to your local machine. On the shell, type
git clone git@github.com:pastewka/yamd.git
(and replace “pastewka” and “yamd” with whatever is appropriate for you). The code now resides in the subdirectory “yamd”. Note that if you do not want to work on github, you can also directly check out the template repository.
Our template repository has existing Meson files. Those Meson files are set up to automatically download the libraries
- Eigen for basic (array) data structures and
- Googletest as a testing framework.
We will work with these libraries throughout this class.
Note: If you are unfamiliar with the unix shell, we recommend this tutorial. We also strongly recommend that you use version control (git). If you are unfamiliar with git and want to learn more, see this tutorial.
Compiling the code
At the root of your repository is a README file with the compilation instructions. It also describes in details how the repository is laid out and where you should add new files.
For now, follow the instructions to compile the code, run the first milestone executable and run the tests. Please refer to this README when you wish to add new files and push them to GitHub.
Task summary
This milestone requires the following tasks:
- Create a repository for your code development from our template.
- Carefully read the
README.mdfile in your fresh code repository. - Compile the template, run first milestone executable and tests, for the following configuration options:
--buildtype=debug--buildtype=release
We provide the following files for you:
- Skeleton repository at https://github.com/imtek-simulation/meson-skeleton/