Installation Instructions for for CbmRoot

The easiest way to install CbmRoot is described in Chapter 3 which introduces a scripts for automatic installation of CbmRoot and its dependencies. If you are unsure how to install CbmRoot please follow the instructions in this chapter.

1. Dependencies

1.1 Compiler

To be able to compile CbmRoot, the used compiler must support the C++17 standard. A GCC beginning from version 7 and clang beginning from version 6 should be okay.

1.2 FairSoft

To install, compile, and run CbmRoot, several external programs are required. These are for example Root, Geant3 or Geant4 and many others. Installing these is the first step of the CbmRoot installation. As the individual installation of each of these programs is very time consuming, the FairRoot team provides a software bundle known as FairSoft, which contains all the needed packages, and also provides tools for its automated installation on several platforms. The most up-to-date information regarding the installation of FairSoft, together with a complete list of the contained packages, can be found on the project's GitHub page:

https://github.com/FairRootGroup/FairSoft

This page should be considered the primary source of information regarding FairSoft, which takes precedence over any others (which may in some cases be outdated). Additional information, for instance regarding older versions, can be found on CBM Redmine:

https://redmine.cbm.gsi.de/projects/cbmroot/wiki/Install_External_Packages

We recommend to always use the latest FairSoft release version. Currently this is "apr21p2", which is compatible with the latest version of CbmRoot. Different combinations of older versions of FairSoft, FairRoot and CbmRoot may work in principle, but are not endorsed or actively supported.

Please make sure SQLite is installed on your system before compiling FairSoft, as this is required by CbmRoot. Failing to compile FairSoft with SQLite support will lead to a crash during the CbmRoot compilation which results in a complete reinstallation of FairSoft and FairRoot after the package was installed. There have also been reports about problems with other missing packages. Mainly these were the Threading Building Blocks (tbb) and the GNU Scientific Library. Since these packages may be missing in the instructions from the FairRoot webpage please install them using the following commands depending on your OS.

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
sudo apt install libgsl-dev
sudo apt install libtbb-dev

OpenSuse:

sudo zypper install sqlite3 sqlite3-devel
sudo zypper install gsl-devel
sudo zypper install tbb-devel

Fedora:

sudo dnf install sqlite-devel
sudo dnf install gsl-devel
sudo dnf install tbb-devel

The complete installation of FairSoft (and likewise FairRoot and CbmRoot) doesn't need any administrative privileges and an installation into system paths is strongly discouraged, as this may create conflicts with existing software. So please make sure that you do the installation as normal user.

For an installation which is to be shared between users on a MacOS or linux system it is recommended to use the opt/ folder. Consider also using the auto installer (see section 3).

The compilation of FairSoft is the most time-consuming part of the CbmRoot installation and can take several hours, depending on your system. If you are working at GSI there are always ready-to-use versions of FairSoft available. For detailed information please check the following wiki page

https://redmine.cbm.gsi.de/projects/cbmroot/wiki/RunCbmGSI

1.3 FairRoot

CbmRoot is based on FairRoot, a simulation, reconstruction and analysis framework based on the ROOT system, which by now is also used by several other experiments as base for their developments. Beside FairSoft you need also to install FairRoot to be able to compile CbmRoot.

Detailed instructions how to get and compile FairRoot can be found on the project's GitHub page at:

https://github.com/FairRootGroup/FairRoot

We again recommend this official repository as the primary source of information, and recommend using the latest release version.

Other information can be found at:

https://redmine.cbm.gsi.de/projects/cbmroot/wiki/InstallFairRoot

In order to compile FairRoot, you must set the environment variable SIMPATH to contain the path to your FairSoft installation, i.e.:

export SIMPATH=[path_to_fairsoft]

Not setting this variable (or FAIRROOTPATH, defined below) properly is a common source of problems.

2. Installing CbmRoot

After installing FairSoft and FairRoot, to install CbmRoot first create a local clone of the Git repository using:

git clone https://git.cbm.gsi.de/computing/cbmroot

Subsequently, create a build directory:

mkdir build_cbmroot

To proceed, you must set the environment variables SIMPATH and FAIRROOTPATH, to the folders of your FairSoft and FairRoot installations, i.e.

export SIMPATH=[path_to_fairsoft]
export FAIRROOTPATH=[path_to_fairroot install]

From your build directory, then call

cmake [path_to_cbmroot]
make -j[number_of_cores]

After your build is complete, before running any part of CbmRoot from a shell, a large number of environment variables must be set, which contain various library and include paths. This is done automatically by executing the "config.sh" or "config.csh" script from your CbmRoot build directory.

Please note, that you must supply the argument "-p" (prepend) or "-a" (append) to these scripts, depending on whether you wish to add the new entries at the front or back of existing environment variables. Failing to do so will cause the variables to be overwritten, and may render your shell inoperable. This behavior may be desired in some cases, e.g. on the Virgo cluster.

If you are using a Bash shell, you can add the following line to .bashrc to further automate this step:

source ~/build_cbmroot/config.sh -a > /dev/null 2>&1

The problem with this automatisation is that it frequently results in problems if you use more than one combination of FairSoft/FairRoot/Cbmroot. If this isn't the case for you please proceed but keep in mind to unset this automatism before installing any new versions of FairSoft, FairRoot.

3. Automatic installation

To make the installation more easy we provide a script which automatically compiles and installs FairSoft, FairRoot, and CbmRoot in one go. The script always combines the correct FairSoft and FairRoot versions. The full description of this process is at

https://redmine.cbm.gsi.de/projects/cbmroot/wiki/InstallCbmRootAuto

To get the script and the needed CbmRoot source code to your local computer you need to clone the CbmRoot repository from out Git repository using:

git clone https://git.cbm.gsi.de/computing/cbmroot

The needed skript is then available in the CbmRoot source directory and can be executed from there by a one-line command

./autoinstall_framework.sh --fairsoft --fairroot --cbmroot

The command automatically install the defined production versions of FairSoft and FairRoot. If you want to check for the avaible options you can get the complete list with

./autoinstall_framework.sh --help

If any problems appear and the script stops with an error message please redo the installation step by step to see where the problem appears.

./autoinstall_framework.sh --fairsoft
./autoinstall_framework.sh --fairsoft --fairroot
./autoinstall_framework.sh --fairsoft --fairroot --cbmroot

The same script can be used to only install any subset of the three packages. See the Redmine page or the script itself for further details.

3.1 Tested systems

The current version of the script was tested for the following systems and combinations of FairSoft and FairRoot

4. Recommended versions

GCC : >= 7 or Clang: >= 6

FairSoft: apr21p2

FairRoot: v18.6.7

Clang-format: v11.0

5. Further remarks

Compiling CbmRoot with multicore support using "make -j", without specifying the number of threads, is known to cause MacOS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS systems to freeze. Please explicitly choose a number of cores which is suitable for your system.

6. CI and Code formatting

For information about our Merge-Request CI chain, including code formatting, please refere to this description page