avida

Avida http://avida.devosoft.org/

Digital Evolution Laboratory at Michigan State University (http://devolab.msu.edu)

The top-level repository/distribution of Avida consists of multiple submodules.

I. REQUIREMENTS II. GETTING STARTED III. CMAKE CONFIGURATION OPTIONS IV. CONFIGURING THE CMAKE BUILD V. RUNNING CONSISTENCY TESTS VI. DOCUMENTATION

I. REQUIREMENTS

General System Requirements

avida:

• CMake 2.6.x or greater (http://www.cmake.org/)
• C++ Compiler and Make system supported by CMake

Additional Requirements for Specific Targets

avida-viewer (on Linux/Unix Platforms):

• ncurses

avida-viewer/Avida.exe (on Windows using included Visual Studio Project):

• Visual Studio 2008 or greater

run_tests (testrunner):

• python 2.6 or greater

Mac OS X Development (using included Xcode Workspace and Projects):

• Xcode 4

II. GETTING STARTED

Avida depends on some other libraries for compilation, so before proceeding, be sure you've downloaded them with the following commands:

$ cd avida $ git submodule init $ git submodule update

Building Avida on Linux/Unix Platforms (including Mac OS X):

To compile and install Avida, using default settings run: $ ./build_avida

By default, you will get an optimized version of the code, as well as the ncurses avida-viewer. The installation goes into a directory called 'work' that is created in a subdirectory named 'cbuild' directory. See below how to change that.

Building Avida on Windows:

Open CMake, then select the Avida source code directory (containing CMakeLists.txt) and a desired output directory. Click the configure button. In the options panel you MUST turn AVD_GUI_NCURSES 'Off'. Click the configure button again. You should now be able to press the generate button. Open the Visual Studio project generated by CMake in the selected target directory. In Visual Studio select the desired build mode (the default is generally 'Debug', 'Release' is recommended). Build the 'All Build' target.

III. CMAKE CONFIGURATION OPTIONS

Here are the main options available when configuring and building Avida with cmake :

AVD_CMDLINE

• This is a BOOL, either ON or OFF, to enable building interface-less Avida ON by default.

AVD_GUI_NCURSES

• This is a BOOL, either ON or OFF, to enable building Avida console interface ON by default.

AVD_UNIT_TESTS

• This is a BOOL, either ON or OFF, to enable building unit test suites OFF by default.

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE

• This is a STRING, one of "None", "Debug", "Release", "RelWithDebInfo", "MinSizeRel", to vary optimization levels and debugging information "Release" by default.

AVD_GUI_PROTOTYPE_TEXT

• This is a BOOL, either ON or OFF, to enable building the prototype ncurses THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL AND MAY NOT BUILD! OFF by default.

IV. CONFIGURING THE CMAKE BUILD

The following directions pertain to Linux/Unix usage of CMake. Windows users should see CMake documentation for using the GUI on Windows. There are three ways by which you can set the various options.

For a simple 'gui' like interface, from the build directory run: $ ccmake ../

Pressing 'c' will configure Pressing 'g' will generate the make files and exit

If you'd like to be prompted with questions for each option, execute the following from the build directory: $ cmake -i ../

From the command-line option, the cmake option -D allows setting Avida configuration options with the following syntax: -D:=

To completely specify each of the above Avida options, cd into your build directory and type something like: $ cmake -DAVD_GUI_NCURSES:BOOL=ON
-DAVD_CMDLINE:BOOL=ON
-DAVD_UNIT_TESTS:BOOL=OFF
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=Release
path-to-source-directory

V. RUNNING CONSISTENCY TESTS

With Avida built and 'installed' using CMake (the default for the 'build_avida' script), simply execute the 'run_tests' script:

$ ./run_tests

For a list of useful options accepted by the TestRunner script, supply the -h option on the command line:

$ ./run_tests -h

The 'builddir' option will be particularly for Xcode users. This option will allow the tests to be run on Xcode products without having to move the files to where the CMake outputs are placed by default. For example, the default Deployment build can be tested as follows:

$ ./run_tests --builddir=build/Deployment/

VI. DOCUMENTATION

Helpful usage and code documentation can be found in the HTML files in the 'avida-core/documentation' directory. See index.html.

Revised 2011-05-05 DMB