First steps with spack

Please note this all this was tested on a extremely minimally installed server. I.e. just installing something like doxygen can take a very long time as a lot of dependencies will be compiled.

Also important - anything available on the build machine from the OS itself MUST be present on any machine where binaries via spack should be used.

Base setup

1. go to freshly installed repo server and add dedicated user
2. install missing packages: apt install git build-essential environment-modules curl tcl gfortran
3. log into system as dedicated user
4. git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git
5. export SPACK_ROOT=~/spack; . $SPACK_ROOT/share/spack/setup-env.sh

Creating/installing a couple of packages

1. spack create http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/virgo/FrameL/libframe-8.33.tar.gz
2. select default 1
3. edit presented Python package, i.e. put a good description there, homepage and remove unnecessary clutter, e.g.

   from spack import *
   
   class Libframe(AutotoolsPackage):
       """The Frame Library"""
   
       homepage = "http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/virgo/FrameL/"
       url      = "http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/virgo/FrameL/libframe-8.33.tar.gz"
   
       version('8.33', sha256='e06bff19c3b5ad797bceede2389bd0d11e66e44d84115637fb9e71cae404e7f3')
   
       depends_on('autoconf', type='build')
       depends_on('automake', type='build')
       depends_on('libtool',  type='build')
       depends_on('m4',       type='build')
   

4. then try to install it: spacke install libframe (this may take longer the first time around as spack may need to install a couple of dependencies first), if it succeeds, it may look like

   ==> Installing libframe
   ==> Searching for binary cache of libframe
   ==> Warning: No Spack mirrors are currently configured
   ==> No binary for libframe found: installing from source
   ==> Fetching http://lappweb.in2p3.fr/virgo/FrameL/libframe-8.33.tar.gz
   ###################################################################################################################################################################################### 100.0%
   ==> Staging archive: /home/spack/spack/var/spack/stage/libframe-8.33-ervdgnkouxkopzdoqlrjz66iem6pg6pj/libframe-8.33.tar.gz
   ==> Created stage in /home/spack/spack/var/spack/stage/libframe-8.33-ervdgnkouxkopzdoqlrjz66iem6pg6pj
   ==> No patches needed for libframe
   ==> Building libframe [AutotoolsPackage]
   ==> Executing phase: 'autoreconf'
   ==> Executing phase: 'configure'
   ==> Executing phase: 'build'
   ==> Executing phase: 'install'
   ==> Successfully installed libframe
     Fetch: 0.57s.  Build: 40.49s.  Total: 41.06s.
   

-- CarstenAulbert - 28 Jun 2019