OS Specific installation from source

• Windows Installation
• Mac Installation
• Linux Installations
• Docker
• HELICS with language bindings support
• Linking with the HELICS Library
• HELICS CMake options

The following are a few things that could be useful to know before starting out.

Firstly, you can follow HELICS development on our GitHub page. HELICS is open-source. The development team uses git for version control, and GitHub to host the code publicly. The latest HELICS will be on the develop branch. Tagged releases occur on the main branch. If you clone the HELICS repository, you will be placed in the main branch by default. To switch to the develop branch, you can type the following:

git checkout develop

To switch to a tagged release, you can type the following:

git checkout v3.3.1

You will not need a full understanding of how git works for installing HELICS, but if you are interested you can find a good git resource in this page.

Secondly, HELICS is a modern C++ cross-platform software application. One challenge while maintaining the same codebase across multiple operating systems is that we have to ensure that everything installs correctly everywhere. The development team uses CMake to build HELICS. CMake is a cross-platform tool designed to build, test and package software. Having the latest version of CMake can make the build process much smoother. CMake reads certain files (CMakeLists.txt) from the HELICS repository, and creates a bunch of build files. These build files specify how different files depend on each other and when these build files are run, HELICS is built. The exact instructions to run on each operating system are given in the individual installation instructions, but one important thing to remember is that these build files are essentially temporary files. If you have an issue building HELICS, once you make a change (installing/removing/adding anything), you probably need to delete these temporary files and re-generate them. We’ve found in practice that you don’t have to do this too often, but it can save hours of frustration if you are already aware that this needs to be done.

Another valuable piece of information about CMake is that almost every “OPTION” is configurable while you generate the build files. This means you can pass it configurations settings as a key value pair by adding -D{NAME_OF_OPTION}={VALUE_OF_OPTION} to the cmake command line interface. For example, to build the Java extension all you need to do is pass in -DHELICS_BUILD_JAVA_INTERFACE=ON. You can also run ccmake . in the build folder, to get a command line interactive prompt to change configuration settings. On Windows, you can use the cmake GUI to do the same. Again, there are more instructions in the individual installation pages but a useful trick to know if something isn’t documented or a slightly more advanced feature is required. Available CMake options for HELICS are documented here.