Install h5

Compiling h5 from source

Note

To guarantee reproducibility in scientific calculations we strongly recommend the use of a stable release.

Prerequisites

The C++ h5 library requires:

A C++20 compatible compiler
CMake version 3.20 or later
The HDF5 library

The Python interface additionally requires Python and numpy. The Python extension module is compiled with the help of c2py, which is fetched automatically when running CMake with -DPythonSupport=ON.

We do not provide explicit version requirements. Instead we refer the user to the h5 CI builds on GitHub Actions, where recent OS, HDF5 and compiler versions are tested.

Installation steps

Download the source code of the latest stable version by cloning the TRIQS/h5 repository from GitHub:
```
$ git clone https://github.com/TRIQS/h5 h5.src
```
Create and move to a new directory where you will compile the code:
```
$ mkdir h5.build && cd h5.build
```
In the build directory call cmake, specifying an install prefix and any additional custom CMake options (see below). Note that specifying CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX is required:
```
$ cmake ../h5.src -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path_to_install_dir
```
Compile the code, run the tests and install the application:
```
$ make
$ make test
$ make install
```

Version compatibility

To use a particular version, go into the directory with the sources, and look at all available versions:

$ cd h5.src && git tag

Checkout the version of the code that you want:

$ git checkout 1.3.0

and follow steps 2 to 4 above to compile the code.

Custom CMake options

The compilation of h5 can be configured using CMake-options:

cmake ../h5.src -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path_to_install_dir -DOPTION1=value1 -DOPTION2=value2 ...

Options	Syntax
Specify an installation path	-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path_to_install_dir
Build in Debugging Mode	-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
Disable testing (not recommended)	-DBuild_Tests=OFF
Build the documentation	-DBuild_Documentation=ON
Disable Python support	-DPythonSupport=OFF
Build shared libraries	-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON