compile.md

Compiling CACTUS

General instructions

Compilation requires CMake, which can be installed by your OS package manager, or manually (see https://cmake.org/install/)

1. Clone the repo, or download all source files to a folder.

2. In the root of the repo, create a build/ directory, and run cmake/make

   mkdir -p build
   cd build
   cmake ../ 
   make
   

   This will produce a cactus executable in the bin/ folder.
   Support for OpenMP may be disabled by adding the DOPENMP=OFF flag to the cmake call, as below.

   cmake -DOPENMP=OFF ../ 
   

3. The compilation can be tested with the bundled regression tests. Navigate into the test/RegTest/ and run

   PATH=$PATH:../../bin/ pytest ./runreg.py
   

   This requires a Python 3 installation with the pytest package installed.

Windows Tips

For Windows, it is recommended to compile in MingW under MSYS2.

1. Install MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org/)
2. Open MingW terminal (likely located at C:\tools\msys64\mingw64.exe)
3. Install the following packages using pacman

   pacman -Sy git make cmake mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-fortran mingw-w64-x86_64-lapack
   

4. Follow the general install instructions above.

For MSYS builds, the executables will be statically linked for portability.