Guide for developers¶

Setting up the developer environment¶

The only prerequisites before these steps are that you have git installed (which is included on many systems by default) and some version of Conda installed (e.g., Miniforge).

Clone the repository and enter the cloned project directory.

git clone https://github.com/golmschenk/binara
cd binara

Create a Conda virtual environment with the correct dependencies installed.
```
conda env create --file=environment.yml
```
Activate the Conda environment.
```
conda activate binara_env
```

In the future, whenever working on developing binara, activate the existing environment with the above line. When you are done working, you can either deactivate the environment with conda deactivate or just close the terminal.

Building¶

binara uses CMake for building. CMake is similar to Make, but allows builds to be much more toolchain agnostic (compiler, operating system, etc) as well as providing many other useful features (such as automatically downloading dependencies). All commands are expected from inside the project directory.

To build, first configure the build with:

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

Then build with:

cmake --build build --config Debug

This will produce the binara_exe executable inside the build directory. Just the second build command is required for subsequent builds, and will only rebuild changed components.

To clean the build, simply delete the build directory:

rm -rf build

To build an optimized version, first clean the build, then run the configure and build commands again, but this time replacing Debug with Release.

Adding source files¶

The file specifying which source files to compile, CMakeLists.txt, may look somewhat confusing to those unfamiliar to CMake, especially due to the complexity added by importing remote GitHub dependencies, using multiple source languages, and building both a Python library and the main binary executable. For Fortran developers, the main piece you will likely need to change is to add additional source files to be compiled. In most cases, you should add your new source files to the BINARA_EXE_AND_EXT_SHARED_SOURCES variable as other files can be seen being added.