Notes on building environment-modules

Update 2015-10-05

Below are Mark Kness’ notes on building and using environment-modules. I have since found lmod to be a slightly better documented and supported alternative.

  • Bob Grant

Environment Modules

environment-modules is a tool, written with Tcl, that makes it convenient to switch environment settings. It is not required to use DistArray, but we find it useful in development. It is a difficult name to google. I had to build it from source, and made some notes of my steps, which will hopefully be helpful for others that build this.

There seems to be some version available to apt-get for Debian. But I read suggestions not to mix Debian and Ubuntu packages, and as I have Ubuntu, I did not try and configure my apt-get to look at the Debian packages. So I installed from source, with notes as follows.

These specific notes are from an installation from source for Linux Mint (Ubuntu), done by Mark Kness. These actions were based on the INSTALL document in the modules source and the Geoghegan link.

$ sudo apt-get install tcl tcl8.4-dev

This seemed to run ok.

$ tar xvvf modules-3.2.10.tar.gz

I had already downloaded this. Double v means extra verbose.

$ cd modules-3.2.10
$ gedit README
$ gedit INSTALL
$ gedit INSTALL.RH7x

Read the installation notes!

$ ./configure

First step is to run this and see how far it gets. Tcl is the likely problem here.

I got the following messages from ./configure...:

checking for Tcl configuration (tclConfig.sh)... found /usr/lib/tcl8.4/tclConfig.sh
checking for existence of tclConfig.sh... loading
checking for Tcl version... 8.5
checking TCL_VERSION... 8.5
checking TCL_LIB_SPEC... -L/usr/lib -ltcl8.4
checking TCL_INCLUDE_SPEC... -I/usr/include/tcl8.4
checking for TclX configuration (tclxConfig.sh)... not found
checking for TclX version... using 8.5
checking TCLX_VERSION... 8.5
checking TCLX_LIB_SPEC... TCLX_LIB_SPEC not found, need to use --with-tclx-lib
checking TCLX_INCLUDE_SPEC... TCLX_INCLUDE_SPEC not found, need to use --with-tclx-inc
configure: WARNING: will use MODULEPATH=/usr/local/Modules/modulefiles : rerun configure using --with-module-path to override default
configure: WARNING: will use VERSIONPATH=/usr/local/Modules/versions : rerun configure using --with-version-path to override default

It seems that TCL_VERSION, TCL_LIB_SPEC, and TCL_INCLUDE_SPEC were all found ok. (The TCLX variants are not found but that is different and not a problem.) Generally it seems like Tcl is ok, except perhaps for some 8.4 vs 8.5 version inconsistency. A non-default path for the module files themselves seems recommended, so...

$ cd ~
$ mkdir modules

This created /home/mkness/modules on my machine. The install notes suggest that one make a non-default location for these. This directory name was an arbitrary choice.

$ cd modules-3.2.10
$ ./configure --with-module-path=~/modules

Seemed ok. I ignored the version and prefix path options.

$ make

Seemed basically ok, a few warnings.

$ ./modulecmd sh

I got the usage instructions, and NOT any Tcl messages. Ok!

$ sudo make install

Seemed to run ok. Got permission errors without sudo.

$ cd /usr/local/Modules
$ sudo ln -s 3.2.10 default

Setup symbolic link named ‘default’ to point to the installed version.

$ cd ~
$ /usr/local/Modules/default/bin/add.modules

This script is supposed to update my local .bashrc and similar files to have access to the Modules stuff. For me, it modified .bashrc and .profile. But if I say ‘module’, I get an error about an invalid path. It seems that MODULE_VERSION is not defined, so I added export MODULE_VERSION=default to the top of my .bashrc.

At this point I can say ‘module’ at the command line and I get the usage instructions. But ‘module avail’ dislikes the lack of an environment variable MODULEPATH. So I also add export MODULEPATH=~/modules to my .bashrc. This path matches the –with-module-path argument to ./configure.

Now it works!

References

http://modules.sourceforge.net/ The main page for the modules package. It provides a source download: modules-3.2.10.tar.gz

http://sourceforge.net/p/modules/wiki/FAQ/ FAQ for the modules package.

http://nickgeoghegan.net/linux/installing-environment-modules Build instructions for environment-modules. I partially followed these but with several changes.

http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/environment-modules http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/amd64/environment-modules/download http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/environment-modules Debian package for environment-modules. Note that this is two different places.

http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=tcl&searchon=names&suite=stable&section=all Debian package for Tcl.