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INSTALLATION.md

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Overview

These instructions are intended to get users (not developers) of Phlex to a working environment, starting from scratch. This is not the only way in which this can be done, but this method has been verified on the primary supported OS (Alma Linux 9) and will be supported by the Phlex development team on that platform.

We assume that you do not have an installation of Spack already. We only support Spack v1.0 and newer, so if you have an older version of Spack we recommend installation of a new one according to these instructions. If you already have a new-enough version of Spack installed, you can skip to step 6.

Installing Spack

Step 1: create a working directory for phlex use:

Installing software with Spack can require transient use of substantial disk space as packages are downloaded and built. The recommended way to avoid this problem is installing Spack (step 3, below) in a directory in which you have ample storage room. These instructions do that by putting the entire working installation on /scratch; adjust this as your needs dictate.

export PHLEX_WORK_DIR="/scratch/$(id -un)/phlex-work-dir" # adjust as needed
mkdir -p ${PHLEX_WORK_DIR}
cd ${PHLEX_WORK_DIR}

Then make sure you don't already have a spack command on your PATH:

which spack

should tell you there is no spack in your PATH.

Step 2: install Spack

git clone --depth=2 https://github.com/spack/spack.git

If you encounter trouble, consult the installation instructions from the Spack project.

Step 3: make spack available at the command line.

source ${PHLEX_WORK_DIR}/spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh

which spack will show that spack is a bash function.

Step 4: run the spack bootstrap now command to make sure that ${HOME}/.spack exists and is populated properly.

This command can take several minutes, but it only needs to be run once.

Step 5: Modify the Spack configuration to avoid filling /tmp. This is not at all related to Phlex, but until there is spack documentation describing this, we recommend it as good practice.

Run the following, which will open an editor.

spack config edit config

Modify the file to include a new key, build_stage. config key may already be in the file and may already contain other keys. Pay careful attention to the indentation and spacing; YAML is sensitive to these.

config:
  build_stage:
      - $spack/var/spack/stage

Ensuring a sufficient compiler

Step 6: ensure that spack has access to a new enough GCC. Currently this means GCC 14.

Run spack compilers to see what compilers Spack knows about. It may tell you to run spack compiler find to autodetect compilers. If so, follow the instructions and afterward re-run spack compilers.

If you don't have GCC 14 or newer, then install GCC 14:

spack install -j 12 gcc@14  # choose a suitable number of jobs for your machine

Building GCC may take a while (30 minutes or so on a 12 core machine).

Creating and installing the Phlex environment

Step 7: Add the Spack recipe repositories needed by Phlex:

spack repo add https://github.com/FNALssi/fnal_art.git
spack repo add https://github.com/Framework-R-D/phlex-spack-recipes.git

After you have done this, spack repo list should show that you have (among others) a repository named phlex available to Spack.

Step 8: Create a spack environment and install phlex

To guide the creation of the environment, download the environment configuration file, and create the environment it describes:

spack env create my-phlex-environment
spack env activate my-phlex-environment
spack add phlex %gcc@14
spack concretize

The concretization can take up to a few minutes. If it is successful you will see the concretization results listed followed by a notice that spack is updating a view at some path.

You are then ready to build the Phlex environment:

spack install -j 12  # choose a suitable number of jobs for your machine

While the build of phlex itself takes a couple of minutes, this install may need to build (and not just download) many other packages. Thus the full installation may take a few hours.

When the installation is complete, you should find that the phlex executable is on your PATH. which phlex will verify this.