Building Astron from Source

This section explains how to compile Astron from source.

You will need to have a C++ compiler appropriate for your machine (see Supported Platforms below).

Building Astron provides a couple benefits over installing it from a package:

  1. Astron doesn't yet provide packages, so compiling it actually the ONLY way to work with it.
  2. Unused features can be compiled out to save space in ram and hopefully save space in the instruction cache.
  3. Astron can be compiled with more (or less depending on your distribution) debug output. Debug output is useful for development, but should be compiled out in production to see best performance.

Prerequisites

Download the Source

Astron is available on GitHub through Git.

Run this command locally:

git clone https://github.com/Astron/Astron.git

Dependencies

Astron requires a compiler supporting most of the C++11 standard.

Astron also depends on a couple third party libraries:

Get the boost library from here, or install from a package on linux or OS X (with Homebrew).

In some environments Boost is not automatically detected, and you may have to set the BOOST_ROOT environment variable as the root directory of your compiled or packaged boost libraries.

Newer versions of Linux (or Homebrew) may have a libyaml-cpp 0.5+ available as a package; otherwise, you can download the libyaml-cpp dependency directly from

Compiling

Configure Astron

Astron uses CMake to handle cross-platform compiling.

Compile-option documention is still [in-progress](. Using CMake GUI is the other easiest way to see the available compile options with descriptions of what they do. Astron tries to use intelligent defaults, so if you are just beginning with Astron let CMake choose smart default values and should compile fine.

Supported Platforms