Automatically run script for every command prompt

On Unix a startup script such as .bashrc or .tcshrc are convenient for initiating commonly used environment variables for a user. Windows has a different technique for achieving the same for the command prompt. In the registry editor, regedit.exe, locate the AutoRun registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Command Processor\AutoRun

If there is no AutoRun key present under the "Command Processor" key then create a new one of type string. The value of this key can be set to the full path of a cmd script you have written that does something such as defining environment variables for that command prompt. This script can have any name but we will call it ntshell.cmd and store it in path pointed to by the %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% environment variables.

Alternatively one can also define environment variables through the Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\User Accounts and click on "Change my enviroment variables". But this method is not feasible if there are many variables or some variable values are deduced on the fly from scripts. This is the case when initialising environment variables for the compiler.

Run a script once at every logon

Say you have a script in the directory pointed to by the %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% environment variables named logon.cmd or whatever. To make this script run once every time you log on to your account, open the Task Scheduler in the "Administrative tools" group in Control Panel, click "Create Task", set "Triggers" to "At logon" and set "Action" to the full path of the logon.cmd file. This script will then run next time you log on.

Visual C++ 9.0

If you have not purchased Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 the compiler is available for free in the Windows 7 SDK from the Microsoft website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=3138&fa43d42b-25b5-4a42-fe9b-1634f450f5ee=True . It should be titled "Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1". Rather than doing the automated installation from the website it may be convenient to download the DVD iso image of the SDK and then do the installation from that. The 32 bit version is named GRMSDK_EN_DVD.iso whereas the 64 bit version is named GRMSDKX_EN_DVD.iso. There are newer versions of this SDK for Windows 7. But as these use more recent C-runtime libraries compiled programs may not be binary compatible with Python 2.7 which is compiled with Visual C++ 9.0. You would still be able to build individual statically linked executables with those newer compilers. But whether or not compiled python modules can run without crashing using a newer runtime is questionable. After installing the compiler it can be invoked once environment variables have been set by calling scripts such as vcvars32.bat or vcvars64.bat from a command prompt or in a build script prior to compiling. These files live in the folder

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin

OpenSSH tools

The OpenSSH tools used for the Windows build are the ones that come with Git for Windows. If Git has been installed in

C:\Program Files\Git

then OpenSSH tools live in the directory

C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin

which you must add to the %PATH% environment variable. To have the build run without interrupts the private keys matching your public keys on the remote svn or git repositories must be loaded prior to the build with ssh-agent. Create a .ssh directory in the directory pointed to by the %USERPROFILE% environment variable and store your private keys there. Then add the lines

call "C:\Program Files\Git\cmd\start-ssh-agent.cmd"
SETX SSH_AUTH_SOCK "%SSH_AUTH_SOCK%"
SETX SSH_AGENT_PID "%SSH_AGENT_PID%"

to your logon.cmd file. When you log on it will pick up the private keys in your %USERPROFILE%\.ssh folder. If keys require password you will be prompted for them when you logon to the PC. If a key, say mykey_rsa, is not picked up it can be loaded explicitly by adding the line

ssh-add mykey_rsa

just below the above 3 lines.

Makensis

Makensis from Nullsoft is only required for creating an executable Windows installer package for deployment of PHENIX. Bundled up zip files of an installation is always created.

From an existing PHENIX installation

If you want to build PHENIX from an existing installation on Windows where the sources have also been installed then do the following:

1. From the Start menu open a PHENIX Command Prompt.
2. Run vcvars32.bat or vcvars64.bat depending on the platform.

3. Change directory to %PHENIX%\build.

   • If compiling for the first time delete all files and directories except config_modules.cmd.

4. Run config_modules.cmd.
5. Run libtbx.scons -j <nproc>.

From bootstrap.py

Below is a cmd script for manually building PHENIX with bootstrap.py. It first downloads sources from external repositories, then compiles them, then runs tests and finally creates a binary installer. It is assumed the script is started with command line arguments specifying platform and version label that will be tagged to the executables during the build. Because the PHENIX build will access repositories that requires authentication you must provide appropriate user names for the flags --sfuser= and --cciuser=.

PhenixBuild.cmd

SET PLATFORM=%1
SET PHENIXVERSION=%2

IF DEFINED PLATFORM (
IF %PLATFORM% == x32 (
  call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat"
  set PYTHONEXE=C:\Python27_32\python.exe
)

IF %PLATFORM% == x64 (
  call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin\vcvars64.bat"
  set PYTHONEXE=C:\Python27_64\python.exe
)
)

REM Get latest bootstrap.py from Githup
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cctbx/cctbx_project/master/libtbx/auto_build/bootstrap.py > bootstrap.py 2>&1 | mtee build.log
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 (
  EXIT
)

REM             hot update base build
%PYTHONEXE% bootstrap.py --builder=phenix --sfuser=oeffner --cciuser=rdo20 --nproc=10 2>&1 | mtee ..\build%PHENIXVERSION%-%PLATFORM%.log
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 (
  EXIT
)


REM            run tests
%PYTHONEXE% bootstrap.py --builder=phenix --sfuser=oeffner --cciuser=rdo20 --nproc=10 tests 2>&1 | mtee ..\tests%PHENIXVERSION%-%PLATFORM%.log
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 (
  EXIT
)

REM            create installer
call build\bin\libtbx.create_installer.bat --binary --version %PHENIXVERSION% --install_script modules\phenix\phenix\installer\phenix_installer.py ^
 --license modules\phenix\LICENSE.txt --readme modules\phenix\CHANGES --readme modules\phenix\phenix\installer\README --readme modules\phenix\phenix\installer\SOURCES ^
 --dist_dir dist\%PHENIXVERSION% tmp\phenix-installer-%PHENIXVERSION%-win7vc90 2>&1 | mtee ..\CreateInstaller%PHENIXVERSION%-%PLATFORM%.log

In the above script mtee.exe from https://ritchielawrence.github.io/mtee/ is used for piping stdout to a file as well as to the console. It works similar to tee on Unix platforms. A newer version has been compiled that also retains the error code of the program that streams to stdout. This is useful when checking for the success of the builds. Source code and executable is available from http://oeffner.net/development/Stuff/mtee.zip.

Issue defining environment variables for the compiler

If you want to run manual builds the environment variables are readily invoked by calling vcvars32.bat or vcvars64.bat. But if doing an automated build with Buildbot all the necessary prerequisites must be acessible in the executable path from a command prompt. At first glance one might add the full path of vcvars32.bat or vcvars64.bat to ntshell.cmd. However, due to a bug in those files this may lead all command prompts to hang in an infinite loop. A workaround is to copy vcvars32.bat and vcvars64.bat to the %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% folder and rename them myvcvars32.bat and myvcvars64.bat, respectively. Then replace the lines:

:GetWindowsSdkDirHelper
@for /F "tokens=1,2*" %%i in ('reg query "%1\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows" /v "CurrentInstallFolder"') DO (
  if "%%i"=="CurrentInstallFolder" (
    SET "WindowsSdkDir=%%k"
  )
)

with

:GetWindowsSdkDirHelper
SET fname=%TEMP%\tmpSDKvars.txt
reg query "%1\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows" /v "CurrentInstallFolder" > %fname%

@SET WindowsSdkDir=
@for /F "tokens=1,2*" %%i in (%fname%) DO (
  if "%%i"=="CurrentInstallFolder" (
    SET "WindowsSdkDir=%%k"
  )
)
del %fname%

then add a line to your ntshell.cmd with the full path of myvcvars32.bat or myvcvars64.bat like:

call "C:\Users\builder\myvcvars32.bat"

Setting up a PC as a Buildbot slave

The Buildbot slave is installed as per online documentation. For instance for installing a slave named intel-windows-x86_64 in C:\Users\builder\slave chdir to python installed in C:\Python2.7.9x64 type:

C:\Python2.7.9x64\Scripts\easy_install.exe buildbot-slave

and then:

C:\Python2.7.9x64\Scripts\buildslave create-slave C:\Users\builder\slave cci-vm-6.lbl.gov:9989 intel-windows-x86_64 pass

which will make it listen to a master on port 9989 from cci-vm-6.lbl.gov. It is possible to start this slave automatically as a Windows service (equivalent of a Unix daemon) but a simpler procedure is to add the following line:

START "Running BuildBot Slave. Do not close!" /MIN cmd /c C:\Python2.7.9x64\Scripts\buildslave start C:\Users\builder\slave

to your logon.cmd script. Once you have logged on this will place an icon of a minimised command prompt on the taskbar which must not be interfered with, let alone closed. The account can now be locked (Windows key + L) and is ready for doing regular builds from a Buildbot master.