Build and develop with pixi

The easiest way to set up a development environment is to use pixi.

pixi is a cross-platform package manager for developers. It installs all required dependencies in the .pixi directory. It's used by our CI, so you get the same stable and tested dependencies.

Run the following command to install dependencies, configure, build and test the project:

pixi run test

The project is built in the build directory.

The typical workflow is:

pixi shell
pixi run configure
ninja -C build

After pixi run configure, use cmake and ninja manually to reconfigure and build the project.

Environments

The pixi manifest contains many environments. The most common ones are:

• default: core aligator and Python bindings
• all: all aligator features and Python bindings
• all-with-croco: all aligator features, crocoddyl support and Python bindings

To activate a specific environment, run:

pixi shell -e all-with-croco

Using all-with-croco makes it easy to choose which features to build. In this case, use the following CMake options:

• BUILD_WITH_PINOCCHIO_SUPPORT: Pinocchio support
• BUILD_CROCODDYL_COMPAT: Crocoddyl support
• BUILD_WITH_OPENMP_SUPPORT: OpenMP support
• BUILD_BENCHMARKS: Benchmark
• BUILD_EXAMPLES: Examples
• BUILD_PYTHON_INTERFACE: Python bindings
• GENERATE_PYTHON_STUBS: Python stubs generation

With the all-with-croco environment, all these options are ON. To turn one off, pass the corresponding -D flag to cmake:

cmake -B build -DBUILD_PYTHON_INTERFACE=OFF