Please read all text below.
- PREREQUISITES
- (A) SOURCE CODE DISTRIBUTION
- (B) COMPILATION
- (C) COMPILATION NOTES for 64bit platforms
- (D) INSTALLATION (first time)
- (E) INSTALLATION ON MACOSX
- (F) RUNNING GRASS
- (G) UPDATE OF SOURCE CODE
- (H) COMPILING INDIVIDUAL MODULES - OWN MODULES
- (I) CODE OPTIMIZATION
- (J) DEBUGGING OPTIONS
- (K) SUPPORT
- (L) GRASS GIS PROGRAMMER'S MANUAL
- (M) CONTRIBUTING CODE AND PATCHES
The install order matters. GRASS needs at least two libraries which have to be installed before installing/compiling GRASS: For links to the software, see REQUIREMENTS.md in this directory.
Installation order:
- PROJ
- GDAL/OGR (compiled without GRASS support)
- optionally: databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite
- GRASS GIS
- optionally: GDAL-OGR-GRASS plugin
GRASS source code is currently distributed in 2 forms:
The full source code version contains all the GRASS source code
required for compilation. It is distributed as one file (*.tar.gz
package) and the version is composed of 3 numbers, e.g. 3.7.0, 3.7.1
etc. See
https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/releases.
This version of the source code can be acquired either from the GitHub
repository (https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/) or as a auto-generated snapshot
(*.tar.gz
package) of the GitHub repository. The snapshot name
contains the date when the snapshot was created (checked out from
the GitHub repository), e.g. grass-3.7.git_src_snapshot_2022_04_27.tar.gz
from https://grass.osgeo.org/grass-devel/source/snapshot/
IMPORTANT: All Unix based distributions are different. For Solaris, see hints below.
The command,
./configure --help
explains the options used to disable the compilation of non-mandatory GRASS modules. See REQUIREMENTS.md for details on dependencies. Detailed Wiki notes for various operating systems (MS-Windows, GNU/Linux distributions, FreeBSD, AIX, etc) are available at: https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Compile_and_Install
First step of the compilation (-g
for debugging, or -O2
for optimization):
CFLAGS="-g -Wall" ./configure
Explanation of make targets:
make install - installs the binary
make bindist - make a binary package with install script
make srcdist - make a source package for distribution
make srclibsdist - make a source package for library distribution
make libs - make libraries only
make clean - delete all files created by 'make'
make distclean - 'make clean' + delete all files created by './configure'
make libsclean - clean libraries compiled by 'make libs'
make htmldocs - generate programmer's documentation as HTML files
make packagehtmldocs - package programmer's documentation in HTML
make pdfdocs - generate programmer's documentation as PDF files
Next step is the compilation itself:
make
Note for Solaris users (see also Wiki page above):
To configure GRASS correctly on a system which doesn't have a suitable
install program (AC_PROG_INSTALL
ignores versions which are known to
have problems), you need to ensure that $srcdir is an absolute path,
by using e.g.:
`pwd`/configure ...
or:
./configure --srcdir=`pwd` ...
Then proceed as described above.
Note when using a compiler different from "gcc":
By setting environment variables, the compiler names can be defined (C and C++):
CC=cc CPP=cpp ./configure ...
To successfully compile GRASS on 64bit platforms, the required
FFTW library has to be compiled with -fPIC
flag:
#this applies to FFTW3, not to GRASS GIS:
cd fftw-3.3.4/
CFLAGS="-fPIC" ./configure
make
make install
After compilation, the resulting code is stored in the directory
./dist.$ARCH/
and the script (grass
) in
./bin.$ARCH/
To run GRASS, simply start
./bin.$ARCH/grass
or run
make install
grass
See the ReadMe.rtf
in the ./macosx/
folder and the Wiki page above.
Download a sample data package from the GRASS web site, see https://grass.osgeo.org/download/sample-data/
Extract the data set and point the "Database" field in the GRASS GIS startup menu to the extracted directory.
Enjoy.
Assuming that you want to update your current installation from GitHub, you have to perform a few steps. In general:
- update from GitHub
- configure, compile
In detail:
cd /where/your/grass-source-code/lives/
git fetch --all
git merge upstream/main
./configure ...
make
make install
For details, see Guide to contributing on GitHub.
To compile (self-made) GRASS modules or to compile modified modules at least the GRASS libraries have to be compiled locally. This is done by launching:
make libs
Then change into the module's directory and launch the "make" command. The installation can be either done with "make install" from the main source code directory or locally with
"INST_NOW=y make"
You may want to define an alias for this:
alias gmake='INST_NOW=y make'
Then simply compile/install the current module with
gmake
Note: If you keep your module source code outside the standard GRASS
source code directory structure, you will have to change the relative
path(s) in the Makefile
to absolute path(s).
If you would like to set compiler optimisations, for a possibly faster binary, type (don't enter a ";" anywhere):
CFLAGS=-O ./configure
or,
setenv CFLAGS -O
./configure
whichever works on your shell. Use -O2
instead of -O
if your compiler
supports this (note: O
is the letter, not zero). Using the "gcc" compiler,
you can also specify processor specific flags (examples, please suggest
better settings to us):
CFLAGS="-mcpu=athlon -O2" # AMD Athlon processor with code optimisations
CFLAGS="-mcpu=pentium" # Intel Pentium processor
CFLAGS="-mcpu=pentium4" # Intel Pentium4 processor
CFLAGS="-O2 -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse \
-minline-all-stringops" # Intel XEON 64bit processor
CFLAGS="-mtune=nocona -m64 -minline-all-stringops" # Intel Pentium 64bit processor
Note: As of version 4.3.0, GCC offers the -march=native
switch that
enables CPU auto-detection and automatically selects optimizations supported
by the local machine at GCC runtime including -mtune
.
To find out optional CFLAGS
for your platform, enter:
gcc -dumpspecs
See also: https://gcc.gnu.org/
A real fast GRASS version (and small binaries) will be created with
LDFLAGS
set to "stripping" (but this disables debugging):
CFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=<cpu_see_above> -Wall" LDFLAGS="-s" ./configure
The LDFLAGS=""
part must be undefined as -s
will strip the debugging
information.
Don't use -O
for CFLAGS
if you want to be able to step through function
bodies. When optimisation is enabled, the compiler will re-order statements
and re-arrange expressions, resulting in object code which barely resembles
the source code.
The -g
and -Wall
compiler flags are often useful for assisting debugging:
CFLAGS="-g -Wall" ./configure
See also the file ./doc/debugging.txt
and the Wiki page
https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GRASS_Debugging
Note that this code is still actively being developed and errors inevitably turn up. If you find a bug, please report it to the GRASS bug tracking system so we can fix it. See https://grass.osgeo.org/contribute/
If you are interested in helping to develop GRASS, please join the GRASS developers mailing list. See https://grass.osgeo.org/development/
The Programmer's manual https://grass.osgeo.org/programming8/ is
generated from the source code. This requires the installation of
doxygen
(http://www.doxygen.nl) and optionally Graphviz dot
(https://graphviz.org/doc/info/command.html).
The main file is: ./grasslib.dox
where all sub-documents have
to be linked to.
To locally generate the 'Programmer's Manual', run
make htmldocs
To generate documentation as a single html file (recommended for simple reading)
make htmldocs-single
This process takes some time. The result will be found in
the file lib/html/index.html
.
To generate the 'Programmer's Manual' in PDF format, run
make pdfdocs
Please see
Markus Neteler and the GRASS Development Team