How to Install Spack on FreeBSD Latest

Spack is a package manager designed for scientific computing that helps manage multiple versions and configurations of software without interfering with one another. In this tutorial, we will be discussing how to install Spack on FreeBSD Latest.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding make sure you have the following prerequisites:

• A root user account or an account with sudo privileges
• A FreeBSD Latest installation
• An internet connection

Step 1: Install Spack

1. Open the terminal console on your FreeBSD Latest Computer.

2. First, we need to install some dependencies. Enter the following commands to install them:

$ sudo pkg install cmake gcc7 python3 py37-pip readline

3. Next, download Spack by cloning it from Github using the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git

4. After downloading Spack, move into the Spack directory by executing the following command:

$ cd spack

5. Now that the directory is in Spack, let's install it. Use the following commands, which will install Spack and update the shell configuration file:

$ sudo ./bin/spack install
$ ./bin/spack location --install-tree
$ echo '. /usr/local/share/spack/setup-env.sh' >> ${HOME}/.bashrc
$ source ${HOME}/.bashrc

Once the installation is complete, you can use Spack to manage multiple versions of scientific software.

Step 2: Testing Spack

1. To verify that Spack is working, let's install GCC with Spack. Use the following command to install it:

$ spack install gcc@9.3.0

2. Once the installation is complete, confirm that it was installed in the correct location by using the following command:

$ spack location -i gcc@9.3.0

This should return the path to where GCC was installed by Spack.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have looked at how to install Spack on FreeBSD Latest. Once installed, Spack can be used to manage multiple versions of scientific software, which can be particularly useful in a research or development environment.

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