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Getting deal.II

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Timo Heister edited this page Oct 9, 2023 · 17 revisions

Introduction

deal.II relies on a large number of other packages, making the installation cumbersome -- especially if you are new to the project and if you need additional dependencies for parallel computations (p4est, Trilinos, PETsc, etc.). Additionally, there are various different ways to acquire deal.II and its (optional) dependencies and the number of choices can be overwhelming. This document tries to help you navigate the different options.

Please follow the following guidelines:

  1. Are you happy with the latest release of deal.II? If yes, go to the next point. If you want to work on deal.II itself, you will need the latest development version. Go to Development version.

  2. Are you just trying things out and learning how to use deal.II? If yes, try the Virtual Machine or if you are comfortable using docker, try docker. Otherwise go to the next point.

  3. Is your machine running Windows? See Windows. Are you running MacOS? You can use the prebuilt package. See MacOS.

  4. Are you running Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Gentoo/..., consider installing a Linux package. If not, continue to the next point.

  5. If you need additional dependencies (MPI, Trilinos, p4est, PETSC, ...) it is easier to use a source-based installer like candi or spack. Otherwise, go to the next point.

  6. Get the source code to deal.II by downloading the .tar.gz file from the latest release at https://github.com/dealii/dealii/releases and go to Installation from source.

  7. None of this works or still lost? Contact us at https://www.dealii.org/mail.html

Installation from source

Download a .tar.gz with the source from https://github.com/dealii/dealii/releases or clone the git repository ( git clone https://github.com/dealii/dealii.git) and proceed with installation as described at https://www.dealii.org/current/readme.html#installation

Virtual Machine

Install VirtualBox on your Windows/MacOS/Linux machine and download the virtual machine image from https://www.math.clemson.edu/~heister/dealvm/

docker

After you install docker on your machine, you can download and run precompiled docker images. See https://github.com/dealii/docker-files for more information.

Development version

  • You can use the VM or windows WSL, but most of us run Linux (or MacOS) natively.
  • You will need to install deal.II from source. See "Development sources" at https://www.dealii.org/download.html
  • What dependencies you need depends on what you are trying to do. You can install dependencies in several different ways: manually, using the Debian/Ubuntu or other packages, using candi, or using spack

Windows

Additional information: https://github.com/dealii/dealii/wiki/Windows

If you are running Windows 10, we recommend using the WSL as this allows you to use the Debian/Ubuntu packages and run with MPI and other dependencies. Alternatively, you can compile deal.II natively under Visual Studio, but there is limited support for other dependencies (MPI, TBB, PETSc, Trilinos).

Note that the WSL practically works like a Linux machine (with a few quirks such as graphical user interfaces), so you can install dependencies (and deal.II) from source or using candi or spack.

WSL installation steps:

  1. Enable WSL in an Admin Power Shell (see WSL Guide for more details):
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart
  1. Open the Microsoft store and install "Ubuntu 20.04"
  2. Reboot your computer, open "Ubuntu", a terminal appears and you are asked to create an account.
  3. Install deal.II:
sudo -i

export REPO=ppa:ginggs/deal.ii-9.5.1-backports

apt-get update && apt-get install -y software-properties-common
add-apt-repository $REPO
apt-get update
apt-get install libdeal.ii-dev
apt-get install build-essential cmake ninja-build gdb git-core
  1. Optional: install VS Code with the "c++" and the "WSL" extension.

MacOS

We provide a binary package (.dmg) as part of each of the releases, see https://github.com/dealii/dealii/releases and download and install it. For more details see https://github.com/dealii/dealii/wiki/MacOSX

Note: If you are running one of the newer ARM M1 chips, please see https://github.com/dealii/dealii/wiki/Apple-ARM-M1-OSX instead. The binary packages will not work.

Otherwise, the .dmg is also a convenient way to acquire common dependencies and installing from source is then easy, see "Installation from source".

If the .dmg does not work for you (different MacOS version or you encounter other problems), you can always Install from source (if you don't need other dependencies), or using candi (if you do).

Linux packages

We provide packages to several linux distributions as shown under "Linux distributions" at https://www.dealii.org/download.html

For example, if you are running Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 you can use the deal.II package using

export REPO=ppa:ginggs/deal.ii-9.5.1-backports

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository $REPO
sudo apt-get install -y libdeal.ii-dev

For a complete list of backports see https://github.com/dealii/dealii/wiki/Debian-and-Ubuntu

Candi

Candi is a tool maintained by the deal.II community to install deal.II and many of the optional dependencies on a linux-like system from source and is quite useful to run on clusters where you typically need to install packages manually. See https://github.com/dealii/candi

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