Installation

Installing autodiff is easy, since it is a header-only library. Follow the steps below.

Installation using Conda

If you have Anaconda or Miniconda installed (with Python 3.7+), you can install autodiff with a single command:

conda install conda-forge::autodiff

This will install autodiff in the conda environment that is active at the moment (e.g., the default conda environment is named base).

Development Environment

Anaconda or Miniconda can be used to create a full development environment using conda-devenv.

You can install conda-devenv and build the development environment defined in environment.devenv.yml as follows:

conda install conda-devenv
conda devenv

The above commands will produce a {{ conda }} environment called autodiff with all the dependencies installed. You can activate the development environment with

conda activate autodiff

and follow the instructions below to build autodiff from source.

Installation using CMake

If you have cmake installed in your system, you can then not only install autodiff but also build its examples and tests. First, you'll need to download it by either git cloning its GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/autodiff/autodiff

or by clicking here to start the download of a zip file, which you should extract to a directory of your choice.

Then, execute the following steps (assuming you are in the root of the source code directory of autodiff!):

mkdir .build && cd .build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --target install

Attention

We assume above that you are in the root of the source code directory, under autodiff! The build directory will be created at autodiff/.build. We use .build here instead of the more usual build because there is a file called BUILD that provides support to Bazel build system. In operating systems that treats file and directory names as case insensitive, you may not be able to create a build directory.

The previous installation commands will require administrative rights in most systems. To install autodiff locally, use:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/some/local/dir

Build Using Bazel

bazel can be used as build system.

Attention

bazel support is part of the community effort. Therefore, it is not officially supported.

Currently, running the unit tests and installing the library using bazel is not supported.

Build and Run Examples

Build all examples using bazel:

bazel build //examples/forward:all
bazel build //examples/reverse:all

Run all examples using bazel and display their output:

bazel test //examples/forward:all --test_output=all
bazel test //examples/reverse:all --test_output=all

Installation by copying

Assuming the git cloned repository or the extracted source code resides in a directory named autodiff, you can now copy the sub-directory autodiff/autodiff to somewhere in your project directory and directly use autodiff.

Installation failed. What do I do?

Discuss with us first your question on our GitHub Discussion Channel. We may be able to respond more quickly there on how to sort out your issue. If bug fixes are indeed required, we'll kindly ask you to create a GitHub Issue, in which you can provide more details about the issue and keep track of our progress on fixing it. You are also welcome to recommend us installation improvements in the Gitter channel.