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IMP Manual  for IMP version 2.9.0
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CMake configuration options

Table of Contents

Building with CMake

We use CMake to configure the IMP build when building from source.

There are two different ways to configure with cmake; one is to run cmake in a fresh directory passing some options on the command line, and the other is to run ccmake and use its editor to change options. For both, assume you are in a directory called debug and the IMP source is in a directory at ../imp. We are using the default of makefiles for the actual building.

Note that we need CMake 2.8 or later; on RHEL/CentOS systems this is provided by the cmake28 package in EPEL (and type cmake28 rather than cmake on the command line).

Configuring with cmake command line options

To configure and build as simply as possible do 

cmake ../imp
make -j8

To make a debug build of IMP with the cgal and membrane modules disabled and core compiled in per-cpp mode, and to use Ninja instead of make as your build command do: 

cmake ../imp -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -G Ninja -DIMP_DISABLED_MODULES=cgal:membrane -DIMP_PER_CPP_COMPILATION=core
ninja -j8

Configuring using ccmake

  1. Run ccmake ../imp You can then look through the various options available.
  2. If you want a debug build, set CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE to Debug
  3. Tell cmake to configure (hit c) and generate (hit g)
  4. make -j8

You can run ccmake after running cmake as above if you want, too. Running it never hurts.

Further configuration options

You can use Ninja instead if it is available by passing -G Ninja to the (c)cmake call. That is highly recommended when it is available.

Various aspects of IMP build behavior can be controlled via variables. These can be set interactively using ccmake (eg ccmake ../imp) or by passing them with -D in a call to cmake. Key ones include:

  • IMP_DISABLED_MODULES: A colon-separated list of disabled modules.
  • IMP_MAX_CHECKS: One of NONE, USAGE, INTERNAL to control what check levels will be supported.
  • IMP_MAX_LOG: One of SILENT, PROGRESS, TERSE, VERBOSE to control what log levels are supported.
  • IMP_PER_CPP_COMPILATION: A colon-separated list of modules to build one .cpp at a time.
  • CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE: one of Debug or Release.

There also are a variety of standard cmake options which control the build. For example:

  • CMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH and CMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH control the paths CMake searches in to locate IMP prerequisite libraries. If your libraries are installed in non-standard locations, you can set these variables to help CMake find them. For example, on a 32-bit RHEL5 system, which has both Boost and HDF5 in non-standard locations, we use 
      -DCMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH="/usr/include/boost141;/usr/include/hdf518/" -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/boost141;/usr/lib/hdf518"
  • CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX should be set if you want to install IMP in a non-standard location.

Note also that CMake searches in the system path (PATH environment variable) for command line tools such as python and swig. Thus, if you have multiple versions of tools (e.g. /usr/bin/swig and /usr/local/bin/swig) make sure the PATH variable is set correctly so that the right tool is found before you run CMake. You may need to make symlinks or copies to help it out if your binaries are named oddly; for example on a RHEL5 system we need to force CMake to use /usr/bin/python2.6 rather than /usr/bin/python (which is Python 2.4, which is too old to work with IMP) by doing something like: 

mkdir bin
ln -sf /usr/bin/python26 bin/python
PATH=`pwd`/bin:$PATH
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