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Development environment#

The requirements for compiling Fast Downward are listed in the build instructions. Our automated tests have additional dependencies that can be installed as follows:

apt-get install clang-tidy-16 python3.8 python3.10 python3-pip valgrind wget
python3 -m pip install tox

For running the autodoc script you'll need to install txt2tags via python3 -m pip install -r misc/autodoc/requirements.txt.

We recommend using Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 for Fast Downward development since these versions are also used by the core developers and they allow installing many dependencies via the package manager.

Important: We want the code to compile without warnings, but in favour of user-friendliness we did not add the -Werror flag to the build script. Make sure that you compile your code with the -Werror flag, for example by adding export CXXFLAGS+=-Werror to your bashrc. Note that you should build the binary from scratch after this (i.e. remove the builds directory if it exists), since it will not recompile files unless they have been changed.

Installing clang-tidy-16 on Ubuntu 22.04#

We use clang-tidy-16 for our style checks which cannot be installed through apt on Ubuntu 22.04. To install it manually, follow these steps:

  1. Download clang+llvm-16.0.0-x86_64-linux-gnu-ubuntu-18.04.tar.xz from https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/tag/llvmorg-16.0.0 (yes, 18.04 is correct even for Ubuntu 22.04).
  2. Unpack the downloaded file to any directory you like, say ~/local/opt/llvm16.
  3. Somewhere in your PATH, set two symlinks called clang-tidy-16 to ~/local/opt/llvm16/bin/clang-tidy and run-clang-tidy-16 to ~/local/opt/llvm16/bin/run-clang-tidy.
  4. Install dependencies: sudo apt install libtinfo5 libstdc++-12-dev.
  5. Try to run clang-tidy-16.  If you get errors about missing shared libraries, install the missing dependencies.

Running tests#

To run all tests under all locally-available Python versions, run tox in the misc/ directory. The command creates Python virtual environments under misc/.tox. The directory uses ~50 MB and is not shown by git status. You can safely delete the directory after the tests have been run. To run a subset of tests, e.g., only the style checks, use tox -e style (see misc/tox.ini for other test environments). Many of the tests that tox executes are Bash/Python scripts or pytest modules, which you can also run individually. To check a pytest module, execute pytest my_module.py.