openfoam/doc/Build.md

OpenFOAM® Quick Build Guide

Prior to building, ensure that the system requirements are satisfied (including any special cross-compiling considerations), and source the correct OpenFOAM environment. For example, for the OpenFOAM-v2106 version:

source <installation path>/OpenFOAM-v2106/etc/bashrc

e.g. if installed under the ~/openfoam directory

source ~/openfoam/OpenFOAM-v2106/etc/bashrc

Preliminaries

The third-party directory includes a readme and additional information about requirements and a more detailed build guide.

Some known build issues related to specific compiler and VTK library versions can be found in the $WM_PROJECT_DIR/doc/BuildIssues.md file.

If you need to change the default versions for third-party libraries, or use system libraries for some components, please some additional information about the config structure.

Compile OpenFOAM

The compilation process is self-contained and will compile and install all OpenFOAM code and dependencies.

• Test the system readiness (optional, not supported for cross-compilation)

foamSystemCheck

• Change to the main OpenFOAM directory ($WM_PROJECT_DIR). If this fails, the environment is not correctly configured.

foam

• Compile OpenFOAM

./Allwmake -s -l

• This will start the build process, where the -s option is used to reduce the level of output, and the -l option to record the output in a log file. To see all available options use ./Allwmake -help
• In case you need to stop the compilation, continue later by running ./Allwmake again.

Compile OpenFOAM faster

For faster compilation, users should take advantage of multi-processor machines when building the code. This is supported directly by wmake and the Allwmake scripts. For example,

wmake -j               # Use all cores
wmake -j 8             # Use specified number of cores

It can also be helpful to use the builtin queuing (the -queue option), which collects subdirectories and dispatches to make in larger chunks.

The following compilation sequence can be useful:

./Allwmake -j -s -q -l

This compiles with all cores (-j), reduced output (-s, -silent), with queuing (-q, -queue) and logs (-l, -log) the output to a file such as log.linux64GccDPInt32Opt for later inspection.

If you use the -k option (-keep-going = ignore errors) to compile as much as possible on the first pass, be certain to follow that with second pass (without the -k option) at a later stage to ensure that you haven't missed any error messages.

Post-compilation steps

• Open a new shell and source the OpenFOAM environment to see all changes (refer to top of page).
• Validate the build (not supported for cross-compilation) by running

foamInstallationTest

• test any given tutorial case. For example,

foamTestTutorial -full incompressible/simpleFoam/pitzDaily

• Note: the tutorial test can also be done manually:

# Create the user "run" directory:
mkdir -p "$FOAM_RUN"
# Change to the user "run" directory:
run
# Copy tutorial
cp -r "$FOAM_TUTORIALS"/incompressible/simpleFoam/pitzDaily ./
# Run the tutorial
( cd pitzDaily && blockMesh && simpleFoam )

ParaView

OpenFOAM ships with ParaView sources for post-processing OpenFOAM field results. However, it will often be sufficient to use the paraview version distributed with the operating system or a binary package and avoid additional compilation complexity.

If you do wish to compile ParaView from source, it is recommended that you do so after completing an initial compilation of OpenFOAM. This gets the process started much more quickly. At a later stage, the OpenFOAM visualization module can be compiled for a particular ParaView version without recompiling OpenFOAM itself.

If you decide to compile in two passes, you only need to execute the top-level Allwmake a second time. Do not use wclean to force a complete rebuild! This is unnecessary.

More details in the ThirdParty build guide.

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