This project aims to provide a coherent environment for building and testing the software used by the STAR experiment. We use CMake to support out-of-source builds of the entire STAR code base. The source consists of approximately 4M lines of code written primarily in C++, Fortran, and C, and is available from the STAR Git repository.

We also provide Dockerfiles for anyone willing to use the STAR software within a reproducible working environment. The images built from these Dockerfiles contain all external packages required by the STAR framework.

Building and installing STAR software with CMake and make

git clone https://github.com/star-bnl/star-sw.git
git clone https://github.com/star-bnl/star-cvs.git
mkdir star-build && cd star-build
cmake ../star-sw -DSTAR_SRC=../star-cvs -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../star-install
make -j[N]
make install

where [N] is the number of compile jobs to run simultaneously, e.g. set it to$(nproc).

Prerequisites

Several external tools required to build the STAR libraries on a Linux box:

• CMake (>= 3.6)
• C++ compiler with C++11 support (gcc >= 4.8.5)
• Fortran compiler (gcc >= 4.8.5)
• bison 2.7 or yacc 1.9
• flex 2.5
• perl 5.16
• python2 and python3.7, pip, pyparsing, and standard linux tools such as awk, grep, ...

The STAR software also depends on the following external packages/libraries:

• ROOT5 (e.g. 5.34.38), http://root.cern
• MySQL
• XML2
• X11, log4cxx, curl
• CERNLIB, lapack, blas

Release Notes

Highlighted features of the past releases can be found here

Next proposed features

• Revisit cvs2git scripts and move them to this repository
• Implement basic CI based on STAR nightly tests

Motivation for CMake

The STAR software is based on more than 20 years of effort invested by scientists and students with various levels of experience in software development. Historically, the software was built using the GNU cons build system. This project provides an alternative way to build the libraries based on the CMake family of tools. Below we highlight a few aspects motivated this work.

• According to cons web page (last updated in 2001)

  cons has been decommissioned [...]

  Meanwhile, CMake is close to becoming a "standard" build tool for C++ projects

• Unlike with cons multi-threaded builds are possible with CMake (e.g. make -j). Our tests indicate a reduction in build time from 2 hours to under 20 minutes of the entire code base using four concurrent threads

• With cons builds the separation of the source, build, and install locations is not well defined. Our CMake builds allow one to install the libraries and auxiliary files into well-isolated multiple directories from same source