Installing bfscplate2d

From the distributed packages

Install from the distributed packages, with the dependencies NumPy, SciPy and composites, by simply doing:

python -m pip install bfscplate2d

From the source code

The element is written in Cython, translated to C++ and compiled when the package is built, such that installing from the source code requires a C++ compiler, e.g. Microsoft Visual C++ on Windows, GCC on Linux or Clang on macOS. The package metadata, with the version, and the build requirements, setuptools and Cython, are in pyproject.toml; pip installs the build requirements in an isolated environment:

python -m pip install .

The requirements of the tests and of the build, including Cython and pytest, are listed in requirements.txt:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

requirements.txt also lists structsolve, which solves the nonlinear static analysis of the tests and of the examples and cross-checks some of their linear buckling and natural frequency solutions, see Analyses. It is a requirement of the tests and of the examples of the documentation only: bfscplate2d does not import it, and it is not installed with bfscplate2d, not being in the dependencies of pyproject.toml. The tests require a version of structsolve newer than 0.8.0, with the module structsolve.convergence and Crisfield’s convergence criterion as default. The examples of Analyses require structsolve 0.9.3 or newer, whose residual is \(\boldsymbol{R} = \boldsymbol{F}_{int} - \lambda \boldsymbol{F}_{ext}\), the convention of these pages.

To build in place, for running the tests from the source tree, which also writes bfscplate2d/version.py with the version of pyproject.toml:

python setup.py build_ext --inplace

and the tests with:

python -m pytest tests

setup.py compiles with /O2 on Windows and with -O3 -fno-math-errno on Linux and macOS, without flags that change the floating-point results, e.g. -ffast-math, or that tie the binaries to the processor that built them, e.g. -march=native. On Linux it also links with -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++.

A build for the coverage of the Cython code, with line tracing and without optimization, is requested with CYTHON_TRACE_NOGIL in the environment or with:

python setup.py build_ext --inplace --force --define CYTHON_TRACE

as in run_setup_coverage.bat. setup.py regenerates the C++ file when it was generated in the other mode, with or without line tracing.

Building the documentation

The documentation requires Sphinx, numpydoc, nbsphinx and the PyData Sphinx theme, and the package built in place, see above:

python -m pip install sphinx numpydoc nbsphinx pydata-sphinx-theme
cd doc
make html