CMake first-time user guide

This page serves as a quick-start guide to verify your installation. It will walk you through a first run of Chaste – building and running the Continuous test pack. Chaste uses cmake to configure a build, make to compile the configured build, and ctest to run the resulting executables. Each of these steps is described in more detail on other pages (e.g. see the CMake Build Guide).

Prerequisites#

You must have obtained the source code and installed the dependencies. See Getting Started if you haven’t yet.

Setting up a build directory#

Let us assume you have the Chaste source code in the directory:

/path/to/Chaste_source_code

Create an empty chaste_build directory outside the source directory, and change into it:

mkdir /path/to/chaste_build
cd /path/to/chaste_build

Configure step#

The first step is to configure Chaste using cmake. This will locate all dependencies, and generate the build targets.

cmake /path/to/Chaste_source_code

This command will print a bunch of things to the terminal. If it runs without any errors, the last lines of the output will be:

-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
-- Build files have been written to: /path/to/chaste_build

Build step#

Next, we compile Chaste using the make utility. In this guide, we will compile the Continuous test pack; the core set of unit tests that will determine whether everything is working as expected.

make -j4 Continuous

Note the capital C! The -j4 will speed up the compilation by using 4 cores on your processor; adjust this number if you have more or fewer cores available. This step should take around 90 minutes, depending on your machine.

If this command runs with no errors, the last lines of the output will be:

[100%] Built target Continuous
program finished with exit code 0
elapsedTime=<some_amount_of_time>

Testing step#

Now that the Continuous test pack is compiled, we run the tests using ctest:

ctest -j4 -L Continuous

If all the tests pass, you should see the following towards the end of the output:

100% tests passed, 0 tests failed out of 366

Label Time Summary:
...
...

If you see this, you’re good to go! Head over to the Chaste User Guides for next steps.

Troubleshooting#

Users of the Ubuntu package#

If you installed Chaste with the Ubuntu package, it really ought to work out-of-the-box!

After re-trying these steps, please let us know on our Q&A page.

Users on non-Ubuntu Linux distributions#

First, check that the version of each dependency is listed as supported on our dependency versions page.

If you are using supported package versions, you may need to provide CMake with some hints for finding dependencies, during the configure step. You can find details in the more detailed CMake Build Guide.

If you are still having problems, please let us know on our Q&A page.