Cmake first-time user guide

Cmake first-time user guide

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 in other parts of this Wiki (e.g. see the detailed CMake guide), but this page serves simply as a quick-start guide to verify your installation.

This page will walk you through a first run of Chaste: building and running the Continuous Test Pack.

Prerequisites

You must have obtained the source code and installed the dependencies. See GettingStarted 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

If you do see errors, you may need to set some paths to dependencies manually, see ChasteGuides/FindingChasteDependencies.

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 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 users' mailing list.

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 users' mailing list.

Users on Mac OS X

Check out the OS X installation instructions. Please note that these instructions may become quickly out-of-date due to Home Brew always brewing the very latest package versions.