Spack-Complete-Me (scm)

This script is intend to help you to accelerate an installation process of HPC packages with Spack.

Spack is a great tool but installing packages can take too long especially when you are working on a system which has not been pre-configured: your personal computer, laptop or you are building Docker or Singularity images. A typical HPC package is build on top of some libraries, these libraries depends on others and so on. Moreover, a library or a package can depend on a building tool or tools. All of these can result in a huge building tree which Spack is going to install/compile from sources. However, a decent Linux distribution may have versions of low-level packages (building dependencies) which could be ok for your purposes i.e., autoconf, automake, pkg-config, m4, tar, etc.

You can list all building dependencies that your typical installation needs in a simple yaml file and provide it as an input to the script. The script will try to find these packages, their versions and installation paths. The results will be printed to stdout which can be redirected to ~/.spack/packages.yaml.

It is good to remember that once you add a package to ~/.spack/packages.yaml as buildable: False you impose some constrains on your destination library or packages. Sometimes it can result in unsuccessful builds. Therefore, please, be careful while using this option.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/ravil-mobile/spack-complete-me.git
cd  spack-complete-me
pip install -e .

Usage

To just print discovered packages to stdout

python scm -f <path>/scm-spec.yaml 

To build Docker/Singularity images with Spack or when Spack is firstly installed on a system

python scm -f <path>/scm-spec.yaml -H > ~/.spack/packages.yaml

To populate an existing packages.yaml file with some packages

python scm -f <path>/scm-spec.yaml >> ~/.spack/packages.yaml

if an input file is not provided scm will try to read one in $HOME/.spack/scm-spec.yaml

Options	Descriptions
'-f', '--file'	path to an input yaml file
'-b', '--buildable'	denotes found packages as buildable
'-H', '--header'	prepends output with packages: line
'-v', '--verbose'	prints some debug information
'-i', '--indent'	indent width (default is 2

An input file example:

spec:
  - tar
  - automake
  - autoconf
  - pkg-config
  - python3
  - m4
  - xz
  - perl