Development Overview

The Development section covers everything you need to set up a working development environment, build ChronoLog from source, and run its test suite. Whether you are fixing a bug, adding a feature, or exploring the codebase, start here to get your toolchain in place.

What's in this section

Environment Setup

ChronoLog builds on Linux with a C++17 compiler and manages its dependency tree through Spack. This page walks through two setup paths: building from source with Spack v0.21.2 or using the pre-built Docker image with all dependencies included. It also covers optional IDE configuration for CLion and VS Code.

See Environment Setup for the full setup instructions.

Building for Development

Once your environment is ready, the developer deployment scripts handle the build-install-run cycle. This page documents the single-node (local_single_user_deploy.sh) and cluster (single_user_deploy.sh) scripts, their execution modes (build, install, start, stop, clean), and all available options including build type, directory paths, and process counts.

See Building for Development for build workflows and script reference.

Running Tests

ChronoLog's test suite spans unit, integration, communication, overhead, and system tests, with ~133 CTest entries in a debug build. This page catalogs every test, explains how to run subsets with CTest, and documents which tests require a live deployment (manual tests) or are temporarily disabled.

See Running Tests for the full test catalog and execution instructions.

Typical workflow

1. Set up your environment — install dependencies via Spack or pull the Docker image
2. Build in Debug mode — use local_single_user_deploy.sh --build --build-type Debug
3. Install — use local_single_user_deploy.sh --install
4. Run tests — ctest --output-on-failure -j$(nproc) from the build directory
5. Start ChronoLog — use local_single_user_deploy.sh --start for manual/integration tests that need a live deployment