Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
149 lines (115 loc) · 7.16 KB

getting_started.md

File metadata and controls

149 lines (115 loc) · 7.16 KB
Raw

Getting started

  1. Getting started
    1. Prerequisites
    2. Installation
    3. CMake build system
    4. Build Acts on lxplus
    5. Build Acts on your local machine
  2. Using Acts in your own cmake project
  3. Documentation

Prerequisites

Only few dependencies are required to build the Core library of Acts. A list of prerequisites required is given below with the version numbers indicating which versions were tested. Older versions may or may not work, feedback is very welcome.

The following dependencies are required:

  • A C++14 compatible compiler, e.g. gcc (>= 6.2) or clang (>= 4.0)
  • cmake (>= 3.7)
  • boost (>= 1.62, with program_options and unit_test_framework)
  • Eigen (>= 3.2.9)

The following dependencies are optional and are only needed for some of the components:

  • DD4Hep (>= 1.02) for the DD4Hep plugin
  • doxygen (>= 1.8.11) for the documentation
  • graphviz (>= 2.28.00) for the documentation
  • ROOT (>= 6.10.00) for the TGeo plugin

Compatible versions of all dependencies are provided by LCG releases. The current recommended release for building Acts is the LCG94 Release. This release is also used in the continous integration (CI) system to test the software. Setup scripts are provided in the repository that can be used to setup this release, and a few others, on lxplus machines at CERN (see below).

Installation and quick start

The Acts repository is hosted on the GitLab instance at CERN. In order to aquire the latest version from the git repository you can simply clone:

git clone https://gitlab.cern.ch/acts/acts-core.git <ACTS_DIR>

You can then cd <ACTS_DIR> continue building Acts:

source CI/setup_lcg94.sh
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . -- install

CMake build system

CMake is used as build system for compiling and installing Acts. For a complete list of CMake options please refer to the official documentation and this nice list of general cmake options. Important options relevant for the Acts project are given below. They are set by adding -D<OPTION>=<VALUE> to the cmake command.

option default description
ACTS_BUILD_DD4HEP_PLUGIN OFF Build DD4HEP geometry plugin
ACTS_BUILD_DIGITIZATION_PLUGIN OFF Build Digitization plugin
ACTS_BUILD_JSON_PLUGIN OFF Build Json plugin for geometry input/output
ACTS_BUILD_IDENTIFICATION_PLUGIN OFF Build Identification plugin
ACTS_BUILD_TGEO_PLUGIN OFF Build TGeo geometry plugin
ACTS_BUILD_FATRAS OFF Build FAst TRAcking Simulation package
ACTS_BUILD_LEGACY OFF Build Legacy package
ACTS_BUILD_BENCHMARKS OFF Build benchmarks
ACTS_BUILD_EXAMPLES OFF Build examples
ACTS_BUILD_UNITTESTS OFF Build unit tests
ACTS_BUILD_INTEGRATIONTESTS OFF Build integration tests
ACTS_BUILD_DOC OFF Build documentation
ACTS_USE_BUNDLED_NLOHMANN_JSON ON Use external or bundled Json library
CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX The installation directory
CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH Search path for external packages
CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER Set C++ compiler (e.g. g++ or clang++)
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Build type (e.g. Debug, Release) affects compiler flags
DD4hep_DIR Path to the DD4hep installation

Building Acts

Building Acts on lxplus

The first step to build Acts is to acquire supported versions of the dependencies. Which dependencies are required depends on the plugins you enable, as mentioned above.

If you are in an lxplus-like environment (i.e. SLC6 or CC7, with cvmfs), you can use the setup scripts located in <ACTS_DIR>/CI to get the dependencies:

source <ACTS_DIR>/CI/setup_lcgXYZ.sh

where XYZ is the version number of the LCG release. There are multiple setup scripts for different LCG releases, which corresponds to the releases the CI tests against. The releases which can be set up using these scripts are therefore sure to be compatible. You can build Acts with any of these releases. Additionally, there is a script called setup_clang.sh which will make the clang compiler available on top of one of the LCG releases. This configuration is also tested by the CI.

Using one of the scripts, you can use the following commands to build Acts with all plugins using the same dependency versions as in the continous integration system.

source CI/setup_lcg94.sh # example, you can use any of the provided scripts.
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<path you want> \
      -DACTS_BUILD_DD4HEP_PLUGIN=ON \
      -DACTS_BUILD_TGEO_PLUGIN=ON ..
cmake --build . -- install

In this example the DD4hep, Material and TGeo plugins. The install prefix is set to <path you want>.

Building Acts on your local machine

Building and running Acts on your local machine is not offically supported. However, if you have the necessary prerequisites installed it should be possible to use it locally. Acts developers regularly use different recent Linux distributions and macOS to build and develop Acts.

Using Acts in your own cmake project

When using Acts in your own cmake-based project, you need to include the following lines in your CMakeLists.txt file:

find_package (Acts COMPONENTS comp1 comp2 ...)

where compX are the required components from the Acts project. See the cmake output for more information about which components are available.

Documentation

You can find a complete documentation of the Acts functionality and the class reference guide at http://acts.web.cern.ch/ACTS/latest/doc/index.html.