Creating binary installers

This page describes how to create binary installers of the SBML Test Runner for different operating systems. Note that the installation process relies on a lot of third-party software, but not all are mentioned here.

A necessary separate first step is to create a distribution archive of the semantic test cases. To do this, go to the top level of your local clone of the SBML Test Suite repository, and execute the following command:

make semantic-cases-dist

Note the step above can take an extremely long time the first time you perform this in your local copy, but on subsequent occasions it should be much faster because most files will not have changed. Once the make command is done, it should result in a file named sbml-semantic-test-cases-YYYY-MM-DD.zip at the top level of the repository.

Next, follow the steps below for each system. It will be necessary to run the steps on separate operating systems to build the separate installers.

Installers for macOS

In a terminal shell, perform the following steps:

cd src/test-runner/testsuite-ui
ant clean
ant dist

This should result in an application file and a .pkg installer in the subdirectory dist.

Installers for Linux

You will need a copy of InstallBuilder. The SBML Team has an academic license for the basic version of InstallBuilder. The path to the copy of InstallBuilder on your system is set by a variable in the file build-defaults.properties; to change the value, create a file called build.properties and set the value there instead of editing build-defaults.properties directly.

In a terminal shell, perform the following steps:

cd src/test-runner/testsuite-ui
ant clean
ant dist

This should result in two installer programs in the subdirectory dist, with names similar to SBMLTestRunner-3.3.0-beta4-linux-x64-installer.run.

Installers for Windows

Building the Windows installers is currently complicated by the need to generate some files on a Mac. Consequently, building Windows installers is best done using virtual machines and in a setting where the virtual machines can access each other's file systems.

First, on a Mac, perform the following steps in a terminal shell:

ant clean
ant misc-files
ant html-files
ant changes-file-rtf

Then, on a Windows machine, perform the following steps in a command shell:

ant dist