Installation
This chapter discusses MSG installation in detail. If you just want to get up and running, have a look at the Quick Start chapter.
Pre-Requisites
To compile and use MSG, you’ll need the following software components:
A modern (2008+) Fortran compiler
The LAPACK linear algebra library
The LAPACK95 Fortran 95 interface to LAPACK
The fypp Fortran pre-processor
The HDF5 data management library
On Linux and MacOS platforms, these components are bundled together in the MESA Software Development Kit (SDK). Using this SDK is strongly recommended.
If you’re planning on using the pymsg Python module, then
you’ll also need the following components:
Python 3.7 (or more recent)
NumPy 1.15 (or more recent)
Building MSG
Download the MSG source code, and unpack it from the command line using the tar utility:
tar xf msg-1.1.tar.gz
Set the MSG_DIR environment variable with the path to the
newly created source directory; this can be achieved, e.g., using the
realpath command1:
export MSG_DIR=$(realpath msg-1.1)
Finally, compile MSG using the make utility:
make -j -C $MSG_DIR
(the -j flags tells make to use multiple cores, speeding up the build). If things go awry, consult the Troubleshooting chapter.
Testing MSG
To test MSG, use the command
make -C $MSG_DIR test
This runs unit tests for the various Fortran modules that together compose the MSG library. At the end of the test sequence, a summary of the number of tests passed and failed is printed. All tests should pass; if one or more fails, then please open an issue to report the problem.
Installing the pymsg Module
To install the pymsg Python module, use the pip tool:
pip install $MSG_DIR/python
You can alternatively add the $MSG_DIR/python/src directory to
the PYTHONPATH environment variable. Note that in order for
pymsg to function correctly, the MSG_DIR
environment variable must be set at Python runtime (this variable
allows the module to find the Python extension that interfaces to the
back-end).
Custom Builds
Custom builds of MSG can be created by setting certain environment
variables, and/or variables in the file
$MSG_DIR/src/build/Makefile, to the value yes. The
following variables are currently supported:
- DEBUG
Enable debugging mode (default
no)- FPE
Enable floating point exception checks (default
yes)- OMP
Enable OpenMP parallelization (default
yes)- PYTHON
Enable building of the Python extension (default
yes)- TEST
Enable building of testing tools (default
yes)- TOOLS
Enable building of development tools (default
yes)
If a variable is not set, then its default value is assumed.
GitHub Access
Sometimes, you’ll want to try out new features in MSG that haven’t yet made it into a formal release. In such cases, you can check out MSG directly from the rhdtownsend/msg git repository on GitHub:
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/rhdtownsend/msg.git
However, a word of caution: MSG is under constant development, and
features in the main branch can change without warning.
footnote