In order to build the Nexus C API the following software has to be installed on the build system

• C compiler
• CMake >= 2.8.8
• HDF5 libraries and header files
• Optional: HDF4 libraries and header files
• Optional: MXML libraries and header files
• doxygen: for building the API documentation

By default the NAPI is only built with HDF5 support. You can explicit switch on a particular file format by defining the appropriate CMake variable during configuration

• -DENABLE_HDF5=1 for HDF5
• -DENABLE_HDF4=1 for HDF4
• and -DENABLE_MXML=1 for MXML

CMake tries then to figure out the locations of the required library binaries and header files. This should work if the library provides a pkg-config file and/or is installed in one of the systems default locations.

If your library is not in a default location you have basically two options.

1. if the library is installed with a pkg-config file you can add the path to this file to your PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.
2. define CMake variables during configuration that point to the appropriate location.

For the second option the following CMake variables are available

The library provides bindings for C++, Fortran 77, and Fortran 90. To enable them set the following variables to one during code configuration

Aside with the C-library the NAPI source distribution ships a couple of command line programs to work with NeXus files. These programs are not built by default. In order to include them in the build the ENABLE_APPS variable must be set to ON.

Building the distribution with these utility applications pulls in some additional build requirements. These are

• libreadline
• libtermcap
• libhistory (most probably provided by the libreadline package)
• libxml2

As one cannot select an individual program to be included in the build, all these build dependencies must be satisified when ENABLE_APPS is set to ON in order for the build to succeed.

To build the library and program binaries simply use

$ make

and for installation

$ make install

This procedure installs the binaries, header files, and the man pages for the programs (if configured to build them). To build the API documentation use

$ make html
$ make install-html