Use Case
If you have a private CentOS 7 laptop or desktop available for code development, your best approach is to use VS Code “natively” on it.
If you have a different kind of Linux or macOS machine, you may still be able to develop analysis code “natively” on it. See the appropriate pages for details on doing that. (To be written later…)
Requirements
You will need all of the following to use VS Code natively for developing ATLAS offline/trigger code:
- An up-to-date version of CentOS 7 as the operating system;
- CVMFS correctly set up to be
able to mount all of the following repositories on the host:
-
/cvmfs/atlas.cern.ch/cvmfs/atlas-nightlies.cern.ch/cvmfs/atlas-condb.cern.ch/cvmfs/sft.cern.ch
- HEP_OSlibs installed;
- An up-to-date version of VS Code, installed using the Microsoft YUM repository for CentOS.
- From all of the available VS Code extensions you should install at the very least ms-vscode.cpptools, ms-python.python and twxs.cmake to make best use of the editor.
Setup
Set up the partial build of the packages that you want to work on in an
appropriate directory, using the
WorkDir project.
(Note that at the time of writing partial checkouts are not recommended, as
they don’t check out the
.vscode directory
of the repository, which is doing much of the heavy lifting in the following.)
Make sure that you set up your build in a directory called build/, just
beside the athena/ directory. With something like:
cd <some appropriate place>
git clone ssh://git@gitlab.cern.ch:7999/<username>/athena.git
<set up the appropriate branch>
<create a package_filters.txt file>
mkdir build
cd build/
asetup <the appropriate release>
cmake -DATLAS_PACKAGE_FILTER_FILE=../package_filters.txt ../athena/Projects/WorkDir/
Once you’ve set up a functional build directory, where you are able to build
the packages that you want, just execute code from that terminal to start
VS Code. In VS Code then open the athena folder that you checked out in the
previous step, to start editing the code in it.
If you’ve done everything correctly, now when you open the source files included in the package(s) whose partial build you have set up, VS Code should be able to correctly parse those source files, and give you help with editing them.
