IMPORTANT: as of May 2021, this project will no longer be maintained. To make spack detect existing external packages, please use spack external find.

spack-detect

This project provides utilities to detect system-provided packages and generate the YAML configurations for Spack.

Installing

git clone https://github.com/mdorier/spack-detect.git
cd spack-detect
python setup.py install

Using

To generate packages.yaml in the current directory, use the following command.

spack-detect -o packages.yaml -v

Contributing

If you want to contribute a package, you can create a package file in spackdetect/packages. The python file should have the package name following spack's naming conventions. For instance, for the zlib package, we want to have a Zlib.py file (first letter capitalized). For the pkg-config package, we want the name to be PkgConfig.py (first letter of each word capitalized).

If your package can be detected by searching for a header file in a standard location, make your package class inherite from HeaderPackage and define the header_file and version_macro variables. For example here is the Zlib package:

from ..PackageTypes import HeaderPackage


class Zlib(HeaderPackage):
    header_file = 'zlib.h'
    version_macro = 'ZLIB_VERSION'

Note that if you don't provide these variables, they will default to x.h and X_VERSION, where x is your package name (e.g. zlib for the Zlib package) and X is the capitalized name.

If your package can be detected by executing a command with some arguments and parsing the output (e.g. bison --version), you can make it inherite from ExecutablePackage and define the executable, version_args, and version_regex variables. executable is the name of the executable to call, version_args is the array of argument to pass to get the version, and version_regex is the regular expression to run on the output to figure out the version. Here is an example witgh the Bison package.

from ..PackageTypes import ExecutablePackage


class Bison(ExecutablePackage):
    executable = 'bison'
    version_args = ['--version']
    version_regex = '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?'

Note that if you don't provide these variables, they will default to 'x' (where x is the name of the package, e.g., bison for the Bison package), ['--version'], and '[0-9]+\.[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?', respectively.