Creating a local cmake library install

In one of my previous posts I talked about how to install your own versions of a library when you don't have root access.

In this post I will show you how to install a cmake style project in the same way.

For this example I'm going to use alembic as the target library to build and it will be installed in the directory $(HOME)/

First we will download the alembic source

hg clone https://code.google.com/p/alembic/
cd alembic

Now we need to configure cmake to use the correct path for our local install this is done with the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH= command as follows where the = is followed by where you want to install alembic

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/jmacey/
make -j 4
make install

In the case of the current version of Alembic this will install to the directory alembic-1.1.2

Testing

A simple test program to read alembic files from the command line and write out the contents has been created as follows

#include <Alembic/AbcGeom/All.h>
#include <Alembic/AbcCoreAbstract/All.h>
#include <Alembic/AbcCoreHDF5/All.h>
#include <Alembic/Abc/ErrorHandler.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>


using namespace Alembic::AbcGeom; // Contains Abc, AbcCoreAbstract


int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  if(argc <2 )
  {
    std::cerr <<"usage Alembic [filename]\n";
    exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
  }

  IArchive  archive( Alembic::AbcCoreHDF5::ReadArchive(),
                          argv[1] );


  std::cout<<"traversing archive for elements\n";
  IObject obj=archive.getTop();
  unsigned int numChildren=obj.getNumChildren();
  std::cout<< "found "<<numChildren<<" children in file\n";

  for(int i=0; i<numChildren; ++i)
  {
    std::cout<<obj.getChildHeader(i).getFullName()<<"\n";
    IObject child(obj,obj.getChildHeader(i).getName());

    std::cout<<"Children "<<child.getNumChildren()<<"\n";
    const MetaData &md = child.getMetaData();
    std::cout<<md.serialize() <<"\n";

    for(int x=0; x<child.getNumChildren(); x++)
    {
      IObject child2(child,child.getChildHeader(x).getName());
      const MetaData &md2 = child2.getMetaData();
      if( IPolyMeshSchema::matches( md2 ) || ISubDSchema::matches( md2 ))
      {
        std::cout<<"Found a mesh "<<child2.getName()<<"\n";

      }
    }
  }

  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

To compile this I have created a QMAKE project which sets the paths to point to the correct install of alembic

TARGET=Alembic
DESTDIR=./
CONFIG += console
CONFIG -= app_bundle

SOURCES+=read.cpp
INCLUDEPATH+=/home/jmacey/alembic-1.1.2/include/
INCLUDEPATH+=/usr/local/include/OpenEXR

ALEMBIC_DIR=/home/jmacey/alembic-1.1.2
ALEMBIC_LIB=/home/jmacey/alembic-1.1.2/lib/static

LIBS+= -L$$ALEMBIC_LIB
LIBS+= -lAbcWFObjConvert
LIBS+= -lAlembicAbcCollection
LIBS+= -lAlembicAbcCoreHDF5
LIBS+= -lAlembicAbc
LIBS+= -lAlembicAbcCoreAbstract
LIBS+= -lAlembicAbcGeom
LIBS+= -lAlembicUtil

LIBS+=-lImath
LIBS+=-lHalf
LIBS+=-lIex
LIBS+=-lhdf5
LIBS+=-lhdf5_hl

In the university labs most of these libs will be in the paths but you will need to change the ALEMBIC_DIR to the correct path for your install. Finally the LD_LIBRARY_PATH needed to be amended to point to the correct OpenEXR files by adding the following export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib/ to my .bashrc, this may not be needed on your own versions.