Documentation for Release 2024.1

User Projects

There are a few ways to use Chaste’s source code:

  • Professional C++ developers may wish to link to Chaste as an external C++ library rather than use the User Project framework described below.
  • People new to C++ may be tempted to directly alter code in the Chaste source folders. This should generally be avoided as we won’t know whether any problems you may run into are down to Chaste or your changes to it!

Instead of these options, User Projects allow you to use Chaste source code and have the benefit of using the Chaste build/testing framework, by putting User Projects under the projects directory. User Projects work exactly like new Chaste modules (global,heart,cell-based, etc.) and can depend on any of the Chaste modules (or indeed other User Projects). We tend to supply User Projects to accompany and reproduce research articles e.g. CellBasedComparison2017.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that you:

Obtaining the template user project

We strongly recommend first obtaining the template user project, as this comes complete with the necessary CMake infrastructure.

Visit https://github.com/Chaste/template_project and click the big green “Use this template” button, and GitHub will let you choose a new name for your project.

Alternative: mirror the repository

This method allows you to host your repository somewhere other than GitHub, and assumes that you have an empty repository prepared at some location called <url_of_your_repo>:

git clone --bare https://github.com/Chaste/template_project.git
cd template_project.git
git push --mirror <url_of_your_repo>
cd ..
rm -rf template_project.git

User project guide

  1. Navigate to the Chaste projects folder:
cd /path/to/Chaste/projects
  1. Clone your new version of the template project. To do this from the command line, run
git clone https://github.com/<your_github_username>/<your_project_name>.git

where you should replace <your_github_username> with your user name on GitHub, and <your_project_name> with the name you chose for your project repository.

  1. Navigate to your cloned user project repository at the command line, and run
python setup_project.py

answering the prompts given.

  1. To check that your user project compiles correctly, at the command line navigate to a build folder (outside the Chaste or project source folder – see the CMake Build Guide) and run
ccmake path/to/Chaste

Type c to configure; when this process is complete, type e to exit the configuration. You should find that four additional lines have been added to cmake. These are

  • Chaste_ENABLE_project_<your_project_name>
  • Chaste_ENABLE_project_<your_project_name>_APPS
  • Chaste_ENABLE_project_<your_project_name>_INSTALL
  • Chaste_ENABLE_project_<your_project_name>_TESTING

Type c to configure once more, then e to exit and g to generate. When this process is complete, type

make TestHello
ctest -R TestHello$

and check that TestHello passes.

You can now start altering the code, adding your own tests, source and updating the Readme!

Releasing a User Project

Typically you’ll want to do this when there is a particular version of code associated with a paper/project that you want to provide as a download. Once your user project is ready for release, the recommended route is simply to follow the GitHub release guide.

Archiving

Since Git repos can be deleted by their owner at any point, it is also good practice to permanently archive a copy of your repo somewhere. There are a few routes for this:

Both have the benefit of providing you with a doi to enable people to cite your code.

Converting an old SVN user project to a GitHub repository

This guide is a strategy for converting an existing old-style Chaste SVN user project to a GitHub repository, keeping all commit history and author contributions.

It assumes you have git svn installed, and that you have a personal GitHub account.

  1. Set up an empty GitHub repository of the same name as the user project you wish to convert.

  2. Create an ‘authors file’ that maps svn user names with git users’ email addresses. It should contain a line for each contributor to your user project:

SvnUsername = Firstname Lastname <email_address@cs.ox.ac.uk>
  1. Run the following
git svn clone https://chaste.cs.ox.ac.uk/svn/chaste/projects/<user_project_name> --authors-file=users.txt
cd <user_project_name>
git remote add origin git@github.com:<your_github_username>/<user_project_name>.git
git push -u origin master
  1. Clone this new git repository, and follow user project guide above above to check everything is working.
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