Development Environment Configuration

This guide will lead you through the setup of a development environment that will allow you to edit, compile, and test new code.

Repository Structure

This section presents the structure of the repository:

• docs: Contains all documentation associated with this repository.
• src: Contains the source code for the project:
  • examples: Example applications demonstrating how to use the neoAPI with the irsol library.
  • external: External dependencies, such as neoAPI, ppk_assert and tabulate.
  • irsol: Core library for interacting with the cameras.
  • tests: Tests implementation for the irsol library.

Building the source code

The irsol project uses CMake as its primary build system. CMake is a powerful, cross-platform build automation tool that generates native build scripts (e.g., Makefiles, Ninja, Visual Studio projects) from a declarative configuration file (CMakeLists.txt).

We use CMake because it enables:

• Platform independence – The same configuration can target Linux, macOS, or Windows.
• Modular dependency management – External libraries like spdlog, sockpp, or NeoAPI are cleanly integrated via FetchContent or find_package().
• Flexible configuration – Build types like Debug or Release can be selected easily.
• Reusable targets – Internal libraries like irsol::core and irsol::cv are defined once and reused across multiple tools or test suites.
• Toolchain integration – Compiler warnings, assertions, logging levels, and other build settings are driven by configuration flags.
• Out-of-source builds – Keeps build artifacts separate from the source directory.

Ensure cmake is installed in your environment. For openSUSE, this can be done via:

$> sudo zypper refresh
$> sudo zypper install cmake

Building Steps

A convenience Makefile at the root of the repository implements rules for invoking CMake for you.

Note: for each of the following commands, you can build the same target in Debug mode by adding the DEBUG=1 flag after the make command. By default, targets are build in Release mode.

• Building the irsol project, the examples and associated unit-tests

  $> make build

  or, for Debug build type

  $> make build DEBUG=1

  This will compile the irsol project, associated examples and unit-tests.
• Building only the irsol examples without the unit-tests

  $> make build/examples

  This will compile the core irsol project and associated examples.
• Building only the irsol project without the examples and without the unit-tests

  $> make build/core

  This will compile only the irsol core project, no examples and no tests.
• Building unit-tests

  $> make build/tests

  This will compile all targets needed for building unit-tests.
• Building and running unit-tests

  $> make tests

  This will first build, then run unit-tests. Test results are shown on the console once tests are finished.

• Building documentation

  $> make docs

  This will build Doxygen documentation and generate HTML content in the docs/generated/html folder. Documentation is always generated automatically when code is pushed to the main branch of the repository, following the Github action implemented as a workflow.

  A live version of the documentation is published here: https://deldoc.github.io/irsol-camera/

• Linting the code (autoformatting)

  $> make lint

  This will run clang-format on the repository's codebase and format the files according to the clang-format style guide.

  Note: you might need to have to install clang in your development environment. For openSuse, this can be done via:

  $> sudo zypper refresh
  $> sudo zypper install llvm-clang

• Cleaning the build artifacts

  $> make clean

  This will remove all build artifacts for the current build configuration following CMake's best attempt at cleaning the build state.
• Deep-cleaning the build artifacts

  $> make deepclean

  This will remove all build artifacts for the current build configuration by deleting all artifacts in the build and distribution directories.

Some of the above commands will generate artifacts (executables, or libraries) that are generated within the src/dist/<debug|release>/bin and src/dist/<debug|release>/lib folders respectively.

Optional development dependencies

OpenCV is an optional dependency you can install into your development environment in order to compile and run some extra examples that allow interactive visualization of images. Without OpenCV available in your system, these examples won't be compiled.

Make sure to:

1. Install OpenCV via zypper:

   $> sudo zypper install opencv-devel

2. Make sure the following command returns a valid path:

   $> sudo find / -name "OpenCVConfig.cmake"

   such as /usr/share/OpenCV/OpenCVConfig.cmake

   If this is found, when building the examples of the irsol project, the ones requiring OpenCV will automatically be built as well.