Building and Installing#

Supported Platforms#

We have built OpenDDS on number of different platforms and compilers. See README.md#supported-platforms for a complete description of supported platforms. See Cross Compiling for how to cross compile for other platforms.

Configuring and Building#

If not already done, download the source from GitHub.

Use the configure script to prepare to build OpenDDS. This script requires Perl 5.18 or newer to be installed and available on the system PATH. Older versions of Perl will probably work, but are not tested.

To start the script change to the root of the OpenDDS source directory and run:

./configure

Strawberry Perl is recommended for Windows.

To start the script open a Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt that has C++ tools available, then change to the root of the OpenDDS source directory and run:

configure

Optionally add --help to the command line to see the advanced options available for this script. The configure script will download ACE/TAO and configure it for your platform. To use an existing ACE/TAO installation, either set the ACE_ROOT and TAO_ROOT environment variables or pass the --ace and --tao (if TAO is not at $ACE_ROOT/TAO) options to configure.

See also

Dependencies for a full list of dependencies including ones that can be configured with the configure script.

If configure runs successfully it will end with a message about the next steps for compiling OpenDDS.

OpenDDS on these platforms must be built using GNU Make:

make -j 4

OpenDDS supports parallel builds to speed up the build when using Make. Above 4 is used as an example for the max number of parallel jobs. If unsure what this number should be, use the number of CPU cores on the machine.

The configure script creates an environment setup file called setenv.sh that sets all the environment variables the build and test steps rely on. The main makefile sets these itself, so setenv.sh is not needed when running make from the top level. It needs to be sourced before building other projects and running tests:

source setenv.sh

The configure script will say how to open the solution file for OpenDDS in Visual Studio using devenv.

It can also be built directly from the command prompt by using MSBuild. For example, if the configure script was ran without any arguments, to do a Debug x64 build:

msbuild -p:Configuration=Debug,Platform=x64 -m DDS_TAOv2.sln

See also

Microsoft MSBuild Documentation

The configure script creates an environment setup file called setenv.sh that sets all the environment variables the build and test steps rely on. For the command prompt that ran the configure script, these variables were set automatically. If running in another command prompt, the variables need to be set again before building other projects and running tests:

setenv.cmd

Java#

If you’re building OpenDDS for use by Java applications, please see the file java/INSTALL instead of this one.

Cross Compiling#

Use the configure script, and set the target platform to one different than the host. For example:

./configure --target=lynxos-178

Run configure with --target-help for details on the supported targets. In this setup, configure will clone the OpenDDS and ACE/TAO source trees for host and target builds. It will do a static build of the host tools (such as opendds_idl and tao_idl) in the host environment, and a full build in the target environment. Most parameters to configure are then assumed to be target parameters.

Any testing has to be done manually.

Raspberry Pi#

The instructions for building for the Raspberry Pi are on opendds.org.

Android#

Android support is documented in Android.

Apple iOS#

Apple iOS support is documented in iOS.

Installation#

When OpenDDS is built using make, if the configure script was run with an argument of --prefix=<prefix> the make install target is available.

After running make (and before make install) you have one completely ready and usable OpenDDS. Its DDS_ROOT is the top of the source tree – the same directory from which you ran configure and make. That DDS_ROOT should work for building application code, and some users may prefer using it this way.

After make install there is a second completely ready and usable OpenDDS that’s under the installation prefix directory. It contains the required libraries, code generators, header files, IDL files, and associated scripts and documentation.

Note

If configured with RapidJSON, OpenDDS will install the headers for RapidJSON, which might conflict with an existing installation.

Using an Installed OpenDDS#

After make install completes, the shell script in <prefix>/share/dds/dds-devel.sh is used to set the DDS_ROOT environment variable. The analogous files for ACE and TAO are <prefix>/share/ace/ace-devel.sh and <prefix>/share/tao/tao-devel.sh.

The <prefix> tree does not contain a tool for makefile generation. To use MPC to generate application makefiles, the MPC_ROOT subdirectory from the OpenDDS source tree can be used either in-place or copied elsewhere. To use CMake to generate application makefiles, see Using OpenDDS in a CMake Project.

Tests#

Tests are not built by default, --tests must be passed to the configure script. All tests can be run using tests/auto_run_tests.pl. See Running Tests for running all tests or individual tests.