Building PySim on Windows

To build PySim on windows you need:

  • Visual studio 2015 (community version works)

  • Boost Libraries

  • Eigen libraries

  • Python >= 3.5

  • Cython

  • NumPy

  • PyTest

Install a compiler

Make sure that you have the visual studio compiler installed. This compiler is used both for building with SetupTools and for building with the Visual Studio IDE. Since the official Python 3 is built with Visual Studio compiler 2015 this is what PySim, as well as any other package for Python 3 need to be built with as well.

Install Boost

You can download the Boost libraries from http://www.boost.org/.

For PySim to find the boost libraries there must be a environment variable named BOOST_ROOT that is set to the directory where Boost is installed. This directory should have the boost include directory as subfolders.

Install Eigen

You can find the Eigen library at http://eigen.tuxfamily.org. It is a headers only library so it does not need to be compiled. Simply unzip the download to a suitable directory and then set an environment variable named EIGEN_ROOT to that directory.

Check out the Source

The source can be found at: https://github.com/aldebjer/pysim.git

Check out the source to a source directory, e.g. C:/Dev/pysim

Install Python Dependancies

The python requirements are collected in a file called requiements.txt. To install these requirements use pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Building

PySim can be built either using Setuptools or using the Visual Studio IDE. Building with Setuptools allows for creating binary distributions and uploading these to PyPi. Building with Visual Studio allows for mixed python-c++ step-debugging. Both methods are described below.

Building with Setuptools

To build with setuptools open a command prompt and move to the pysim directory, e.g.``C:/dev/pysim/``. To build the c libraries type:

python setup.py build_clib

After that we build the the c++ and cython modules and place them besides the python module by typing:

python setup.py build_ext --inplace

Building with the Visual Studio IDE

There are solution and project files for visual studio in the MSVC directory. Open the file msvc/pysim.sln with visual studio, select the release build and choose build all.

Testing

After all cython and c++ modules are built, either with setuptools or with the visual studio ide, and placed in along the python modules you can use PyTest to test the entire pysim package.

python -m pytest

which should give you a result stating the number of tests, the time the testing took, and a final “OK” printed.

If you want to try using pysim with a python prompt then type

python

You can now do the tests from within the python environment by typing

>>> import pysim
>>> pysim.tests()