compile_grass

An ansible role for compiling GRASS GIS from source on Ubuntu 18.04.

Running this will:

• install all dependencies needed for compiling and running GRASS GIS
• checkout the source code
• create a virtualenv directory and install the python dependencies
• compile GRASS GIS

Major points:

• Almost all configuration options are supported.
• Both Python 2 and 3 are supported (Python 3 is the default).
• By default it uses trunk but it should work with any 7.x branch.

When to use

The main usecase is to kickstart the creation of a GRASS GIS development environment. That being said, the role can also be used to deploy GRASS GIS on e.g. a cluster of servers.

Prerequisites

In order to run the role you will need:

• an Ubuntu 18.04 installation; it can be either a Physical machine or a Virtual One.
• ansible 2.7 which needs to be installed from a ppa. Instructions here
• sudo access (i.e. root privileges)

Quickstart

If you are OK with the defaults which means:

1. build as your current user,
2. use Python 3
3. clone the repo at ~/src/grass

then this is all you need to do:

curl -Ssl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pmav99/ansible-role-compile_grass/master/quickstart.sh | bash

Depending on your internet connection and the CPU power of your VM, the whole procedure should last 10-20 minutes.

That's all! :)

What to do after installing

Due to the way we install the python dependencies, in order to use GRASS you will first need to activate the virtualenv and add the grass binary to $PATH. To make this a bit easier, the role also installs some scripts that take care of $PATH and virtualenv activation. These scripts are:

• do_configure.sh
• do_compile.sh
• run_grass.sh which executes the grass binary. The script passes along any CLI arguments to the grass binary (e.g. --text, --help, etc)
• run_tests.sh which runs the tests in testsuite/examples.

You will find these scripts inside the checked out git repo.

So, after you make a change in the source code, all you have to do is to run ./do_compile.sh followed by ./run_grass.sh or ./run_tests.sh.

If you don't want to use the scripts and you want to manually handle compilation etc, just remember to activate the virtualenv:

source venv/bin/activate

Detailed Instructions

Install the role

You can install the role by running:

ansible-galaxy install pmav99.compile_grass

Sample Playbook

After installing the role, in order to use it you need a "playbook" which is a yaml file. This is a sample playbook that that runs the role on the local machine.

- hosts: '127.0.0.1'
  connection: 'local'

  vars:
    gcs_account_username: 'builder'
    gcs_source_dir: '/home/builder/src'
    gcs_python_version: 3
    gcs_git_branch: 'master'

  roles:
     - role: 'pmav99.compile_grass'
       become: true

After saving the playbook as playbook.yml, you can run it with:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --ask-become-pass

This command will ask you for your sudo password, and start executing the various tasks.

In order to customize what the role will do, you need to edit the playbook file and modify the keys and the values of variables defined in the vars section.

Note: In order to execute the role in the local machine, vars is the only section of the playbook file you need to modify. If you need to execute the role on a remote machine, you should learn some ansible first :)

Role Variables

The only mandatory variable is gcs_account_username. This defines the name of the user that will do own the directory with the GRASS source and with which the compilation will be done. If you do not set it the playbook will not execute. If a user with the specified username does not exist, the playbook will create a new user account with that username. The password for the new user will be 1234 (you can set that too using gcs_account_password).

The sample playbook sets the username to builder but you should probably use your main account's username.

You can set the location of the GRASS repository with gcs_source_dir. Other useful variables are gcs_git_branch which is the URL to the Subversion branch that will be compiled and gcs_python_version which specifies the Python version which will be used (defaults to Python 3).

Compilation options

By default, the role uses the same defaults as the configure script. You can change that though by setting the appropriate variables to true. E.g. to enable MySQL and ODBC support you need:

        gcs_mysql_support: true
        gcs_odbc_support: true

The full list of options can be found at defaults/main.yml.

Troubleshooting

Running

If you see a message like the following:

fatal: [127.0.0.1]: FAILED! => {"changed": false, "module_stderr": "sudo: a password is required\n", "module_stdout": "", "msg": "MODULE FAILURE", "rc": 1}

Then you forgot to use --ask-become-pass

Compilation

You will find the compilation output in compilation_output.txt inside the repository directory. For the record, we had to redirect the output to a file because in case of errors in the compilation, the output surpassed the limits imposed by Travis.

License

MIT