Installation from source

If you intend to work on the NNPDF code, then building from source is the recommended installation procedure. However, you can still use conda to get all the dependecies and setup the validphys and C++ development environment. Further information is available in the vp-guide. Note that the binary-bootstrap.sh should be downloaded and run as explained above, if the user has not already done so.

1. Create an NNPDF developer environment nnpdf-dev and install all relevant dependencies using

    conda create -n nnpdf-dev 
    conda activate nnpdf-dev
    conda install --only-deps nnpdf
   

   Note that the user should be in the conda environment nnpdf-dev whenever they wish to work on NNPDF code. The conda environment can be exited using conda deactivate.

2. Install the appropriate C++ compilers using

    conda install gxx_linux-64 
   

   macOS users should replace gxx_linux-64 with clangxx_osx-64.

3. Ensure that the NNPDF repositories nnpdf and apfel are in the nnpdfgit directory. These are required to be able to run fits and can be obtained respectively by

    git clone git@github.com:NNPDF/nnpdf.git
    git clone https://github.com/scarrazza/apfel.git
   

4. Obtain the dependencies of the code you want to build. Where to find those depends on the particular code. For example, something linking to libnnpdf will likely require pkg-config. Projects based on autotools (those that have a ./configure script) will additionally require automake and libtool. Similarly projects based on cmake will require installing the cmake package. In the case of nnpdf itself, the build dependencies can be found in <nnpdf git root>/conda-recipe/meta.yaml. We have to install the remaining ones manually:

    conda install pkg-config swig=3.0.10 cmake
   

5. We now need to make the installation prefix point to our nnpdf-dev environment, this can be done using:

    $CONDA_PREFIX==~/miniconda3/envs/nnpdf-dev/
   

   this assumes miniconda3 is installed in the default place which is the home directory.

6. Navigate to the nnpdf directory obtained from the Github repository and create a folder called conda-bld by

    nnpdf$ mkdir conda-bld
    nnpdf$ cd conda-bld
   

   Note that it is important that for the following step to be executed while the user is in the nnpdf-dev conda environment. The project can be built using:

    nnpdf/conda-bld$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$CONDA_PREFIX
   

7. When the user wishes to work on the NNPDF code, they should do so in, for example, '/nnpdfgit/nnpdf/libnnpdf'. To compile the code navigate to the conda-bld directory created above and run

    make
    make install