Installation

Table of Contents

• Dependencies
• Installation steps
• Versions
• Custom CMake options

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:

• gcc version 12 or later OR clang version 15 or later OR IntelLLVM (icx) 2023.1.0 or later
• CMake version 3.20 or later (for installation or integration into an existing project via CMake)
• HDF5 library version 1.8.2 or later

For the Python interface, additional dependencies are required:

• Python version 3.6 or later
• numpy version 1.11.0 or later
• mako version 0.9.1 or later
• scipy (version 1.11.3 is tested but older/newer versions should work as well)

The Python interface is built with TRIQS/cpp2py. Please refer to the GitHub repository for further information.

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 1.2.0

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