Some notes are here, but please refer to the official Nalu documentation regarding building and testing Nalu.
In general, to start with a clean slate, clone Spack, clone this repo, add SPACK_ROOT and Spack shell support to your ~/.bash_profile, source ~/.bash_profile, then go to the spack_config directory and run setup_spack.sh to automatically copy over a recommended Spack configuration for Peregrine, Merlin, or OSX, or study the setup_spack.sh script to create your own Spack configuration for your machine. Then look around at the install scripts and testing scripts to learn more about how Nalu is currently being installed and tested. Note the shared_constraints.sh script that is sourced which sets the preferred TPLs for Nalu and preferred Trilinos options.
The file, test_nalu.sh, is used for testing on all machines, and the machine name is passed into the script to be able to perform certain required machine-specific tasks.
Then there are cron scripts provided for each machine which qsub the test job. Note on Peregrine, qsub cannot pass arguments to the script itself (man qsub says the -F parameter should do so, but it doesn't work), so another script is provided that does only the task of passing peregrine to test_nalu.sh.
The cron scripts for Mac are actually plist files which are added to a schedule on OSX by moving the plist file to /Library/LaunchDaemons and using sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.test.nalu.nightly.plist and sudo launchctl list | grep nalu to see that the launchd job was added.
Lastly, there is a script used for updating this NaluSpack repo each night before running the tests so that changes to what is being tested can propagate to all the machines without doing so manually.
Using crontab, the general cron jobs are written as such:
SHELL=/bin/bash
#Nalu update NaluSpack
0 0 * * * /bin/bash -c "cd /whereever/NaluNightlyTesting/NaluSpack && ./test_scripts/update_naluspack.sh > /whereever/NaluNightlyTesting/jobs/last_naluspack_update.txt 2>&1"
#Nalu tests
0 1 * * * /whereever/NaluNightlyTesting/NaluSpack/test_scripts/test_nalu_peregrine_cron.sh > /whereever/NaluNightlyTesting/jobs/last_nalu_test_job.txt 2>&1