LOFAR build instructions

This page describes how to obtain and build LOFAR the software.

Please take note that ASTRON only thoroughly builds and tests the LOFAR software on their production systems that contain RHEL5 32-bit and Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit Linux distros. For other distros and/or versions we cannot guarantee that a build will create a fully and correctly working package.

Mind that to be able to build LOFAR, first you need to have various other custom packages available on your system, among which (this is not a complete list):

• boost 1.40 or larger
• cfitsio 3.23 or larger
• wcslib 4.3 or larger
• cmake 1.6.4 or larger
• hdf5 1.8.4 or larger
• casacore 1.4 or larger, and its dependencies (lapack, blas, fftw, etc.); see http://code.google.com/p/casacore/
• pyrap (see http://code.google.com/p/pyrap )
• casarest (see https://github.com/pkgw/casarest )
• log4cplus 1.0.4 or larger

Some Linux distributions may have ready to install packages available for some of these, for other distros you may need to build these from code or search hard for binary installations. You may require your system managers help to set all these up properly.

LOFAR uses CMake as build tool. For general information on CMake, please refer to the CMake documentation pages.

You will need CMake 2.6 or later in order to build the LOFAR software. Most development was done using CMake 2.6.2. Most Linux distributions contain CMake as a binary package. If yours doesn't, or if it's too old, you can download the CMake sources and build CMake yourself.

Make sure you have a working copy of (part of) the LOFAR software tree. To check out the whole tree:

$ cd <working directory>
$ svn checkout https://svn.astron.nl/LOFAR/trunk LOFAR

Alternatively, you can do a minimal checkout of the LOFAR tree and let the build system do a checkout of the parts that are needed for your specific build.

$ cd <working directory>
$ svn checkout -N https://svn.astron.nl/LOFAR/trunk LOFAR
$ svn update LOFAR/CMake

Please refer to The LOFAR Subversion Repository page for more information on how to check out LOFAR software.

Create a build directory, preferably outside of the source tree. The name of the directory must adhere to the naming conventions described in section 3.6 of LOFAR Build Environment. So, for example, when using the GNU compiler suite to build a debug version of the software, you'd have to create a build directory named gnu_debug.

$ mkdir -p build/gnu_debug

Run cmake from the build directory. You must provide the (relative) path to the top-level CMakeLists.txt file (in this example <working dir>/LOFAR). You can give a list of packages to build using the -DBUILD_PACKAGES option:

$ cd build/gnu_debug
$ cmake -DBUILD_PACKAGES="Package1 Package2" <working dir>/LOFAR

If you plan to run make install to install the built software in a directory of your choice (instead of in the top level build directory), you will have to define CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX on the command-line:

$ cd build/gnu_debug
$ cmake -DBUILD_PACKAGES="Package1 Package2" \
        -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=<installpath> \
         <working dir>/LOFAR

Add package list!

When CMake completes without errors, you can run make to actually build the software. You can use the curses-based ccmake (or use make edit-cache) to edit CMake's cache file to modify any of the cache variables (e.g., which LOFAR packages to build, paths to third-party libraries and/or include files, etc.).

$ make

If you want the build to continue even when encountering errors in the build process, you can add the -k flag to the make command. For instance:

$ make -k 

If you want the the build executables to be installed as well, add install to the make command as well:

$ make install 

Note that the install option only works when the make has completed without errors.

Most (but not all!) changes to CMake files (*.cmake or CMakeLists.txt) will be detected by CMake, and will trigger a (re)run of cmake whenever needed. So typing make is usually sufficient to get a correct (re)build of the software.

Build options can be specified in two ways. The preferred, “static” way of doing this is through the different variants files. These settings can be overridden by the user, either by setting options on the command-line when invoking cmake, or by edit them by using the semi-graphical environment ccmake.

The following options are currently available. This is neither an exhaustive, nor an authoritative list. It merely serves as an example to which global build options may be set.

Some options are mutually exclusive (e.g., USE_LOG4CPLUS, and LOG4CXX cannot be used simultaneously). These restrictions are checked.

LOFAR_SVN_UPDATE uses three states. When <undefined>, only files that are missing but needed are updated. When OFF, files are never updated (this is useful if you don't have access to the SVN server, or if you're working with an exported source tree). When ON, files are always updated.