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Updated 11 Nov 23

Setting up pre-commit

Since version 2.5, preCICE uses pre-commit to enforce a consistent formatting.

To use, install pre-commit and run pre-commit install at the root of the project. You can now force the formatting on all files with pre-commit run -a.

This will also run all pre-commit hooks before each commit, preventing dirty commits in the repository.

Custom pre-commit hooks for preCICE are included in the repository precice/precice-pre-commit-hooks. This currently provides a stand-alone hook for the precice config formatter. The repository provides tags in the form X.Y where X is the major preCICE version and Y is the version of the hook repo.

Formatting the code

The tool clang-format applies a configured code style to C and C++ files. It checks parent directories for a .clang-format file and applies the style to a given source file. To keep the code-base consistent, please use clang-format version 8. Scripts will explicitly use clang-format-8 to prevent any problems. Looking for precompiled binaries? Here is the official APT repository.

To format the entire codebase, run our formatting tool:

cd path/to/precice
tools/formatting/format-all

This will automatically format all necessary files with the tool.

If you cannot find local binaries, you may use the dockerized version of the formatter. It uses our CI dockerimage dockerimage to format the code without having to worry about installing tools and their correct versions.

cd precice
tools/formatting/format-all-dockerized

To manually format a single file, you may use the tool form the shell:

clang-format -style=file -i FILES

Note that -style=file is a predefined option, not a path to .clang-format.

Editor integration is available for:

To disable formatting for a section of code use comments:

int formatted_code;
// clang-format off
    void    unformatted_code  ;
// clang-format on
void formatted_code_again;
/* clang-format off */
    void         unformatted_code  ;
/* clang-format on */
void formatted_code_yet_again;

Formatting preCICE configuration files

To format your precice-config.xml, you can use the script format_precice_config.py which is part of the preCICE pre-commit hooks (without needing to install the pre-commit hooks) and depends on the lxml package (install it with pip install --user lxml). To format a file in place:

format_precice_config.py precice-config.xml

The script returns 0 on success, 1 on error, and 2 if a file was modified.

You may want to define an alias for convenience:

function preciceConfigFormat(){
  /path/to/format_precice_config.py "${1:-precice-config.xml}"
}

clang-tidy

The tool clang-tidy runs static analysis on C and C++ files and reports warnings in clang error format (i.e. editors can parse them). It checks parent directories for a .clang-tidy file and uses that configuration.

We use a custom script in order to run clang-format on the entire preCICE code base. In order to use the script, install run-clang-tidy (part of clang) and clang++. Afterwards, the script can be executed using

cd path/to/precice
tools/linting/run_clang_tidy.sh

which will report potential errors on the console. Executing the script can be done using a make target called make tidy as well. Some errors can be fixed by clang-tidy itself. In order to let clang-tidy fix errors, add the -fix option in the script.

Cppcheck

The static analysis tool Cppcheck can detect some errors and bad programming practice. Simply run cppcheck --enable=all . inside precice/src or inside the directory you’re working.

Static analysis build

CMake can run various static analysis tools on sources after compiling them. A quick way of setting up precice looks as follows:

mkdir -p ~/tmp/precice && cd ~/tmp/precice
cmake \
   -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
   -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON \
   -DCMAKE_CXX_CLANG_TIDY="clang-tidy;-p;." \
   -DCMAKE_CXX_CPPCHECK="cppcheck;--enable=all" \
   -DCMAKE_CXX_CPPLINT="cpplint.py" \
   -DCMAKE_CXX_INCLUDE_WHAT_YOU_USE="path/to/iwyu;-p;." \
   -DPRECICE_FEATURE_PYTHON_ACTIONS=ON \
   -DPRECICE_FEATURE_MPI_COMMUNICATION=ON \
   -DPRECICE_FEATURE_PETSC_MAPPING=ON \
   $PRECICE_ROOT
make -j $(nproc)

As this build will run for a very long time, it may be a good idea to save the output to a log file.

make -j $(nproc) 2>&1 | tee staticanalysis.log

If the log contains scrambled output, use:

make 2>&1 | tee staticanalysis.log