Building from source with the build_and_install script

If you are building on Linux or macOS you can skip to the Building section. However, Windows users have to follow extra-instructions.

Windows pre-requisites

If you are building on Windows, you need to have the following tools installed before starting:

  • Visual Studio 2019 - when installing, ensure that you select the Python extension if you wish to build the Python bindings. Furthermore, you should make sure that Visual Studio’s python and pip executables are in your PATH environment variable;
  • Git Bash - we will use this tool to clone mc_rtc and start the installation script;
  • CMake - install the latest version available;
  • Boost - install the latest binaries avaible from sourceforce. Make sure to select the right version for your computer and Visual Studio version, for example, for Boost 1.72 and Visual Studio 2019 on a 64 bits computer it should be: boost_1_72_0-msvc-14.2-64.exe. After installing, make sure to set the environment variable BOOST_ROOT to the location where you installed Boost and add Boost DLLs path to your PATH environment. For example, if you installed into C:\local\boost_1_72_0 then BOOST_ROOT should be C:\local\boost_1_72_0 and %BOOST_ROOT%\lib64-msvc-14.2 should be in your PATH;
  • mingw-w64 - this will be used to compile Fortran code on Windows. After downloading, you can run the executable. At one point, it will ask you to select several options: Version, Architecture, Threads, Exception and Build revision. For Version you can choose the most recent one (default), for Architecture you should choose x86_64 if you are building on a 64 bits Windows (likely), for Threads you should choose win32, for Exceptions you should choose seh (default). After installing, you should make sure the bin folder of the installation is in your PATH environment, e.g. C:\mingw-w64\x86_64-8.1.0-release-win32-seh-rt_v6-rev0\mingw64\bin

Note: it should also work and compile with Visual Studio 2017. However, only Visual Studio 2019 is regularly tested

Building

  1. Clone the mc_rtc repository;
  2. Go into the mc_rtc directory and update submodules git submodule update --init;
  3. Go into the utils directory and locate the file named build_and_install.sh;
  4. [optional] Create a custom configuration file build_and_install_user_config.sh (overrides the corresponding variables from the default configuration build_and_install_default_config.sh) 
    cp build_and_install_user_config.sample.sh build_and_install_user_config.sh
  5. [optional] Edit the build_and_install_user_config.sh and edit the options to your liking: INSTALL_PREFIX, WITH_ROS_SUPPORT, ROS_DISTRO. On Ubuntu, ROS will be installed if you enable ROS support and it was not already installed. Otherwise, you are required to install ROS by yourself before attempting to install mc_rtc with ROS support;
  6. Run ./build_and_install.sh

The script will take care of installing the required dependencies, clone all required source codes, build and install them. This may take a while.

If the script fails, please open up an issue on mc_rtc issue tracker, providing the following information:

  • System (compiler, distribution/OSX version)
  • Script output
  • Any detail you might think relevant

Getting started

Once mc_rtc has been installed, you can jump to the next section.