Installation

h5 supports the usual installation procedure using CMake.

If you want to skip the installation step, you can go directly to Integration in C++ projects to see how you can integrate h5 into your own C++ project by using CMake's FetchContent.

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

Dependencies

The dependencies of the C++ h5 library are as follows:

• C++20 compatible compiler
• CMake version 3.20
• HDF5 library

The Python interface requires additional dependencies:

• Python
• numpy

The Python extension module is compiled with the help of c2py which is fetched automatically when running CMake with PythonSupport=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

1. 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

2. Create and move to a new directory where you will compile the code:

   $ mkdir h5.build && cd h5.build

3. In the build directory, call cmake including any additional custom CMake options (see below):

   $ cmake ../h5.src -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path_to_install_dir

   Note that it is required to specify CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, otherwise CMake will stop with an error.

4. Compile the code, run the tests and install the application:

   $ make -j N
   $ make test
   $ make install

   Replace N with the number of cores you want to use to build the library.

Versions

To choose 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 by calling cmake with additional command line options

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

The following options are available:

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