Deploy CamiTK with your extensions

Once your extension has reached a stable state, the next step is often to give it to another user or developer so that it can test it. This is what we call “distribute and deploy your CamiTK extensions”.

The dependency chain might be quite fragile when it comes to C++ where there is not (yet) an official package manager, especially on Windows.

This page provides a recipe to easily get all you need to run CamiTK and your extensions (called mycep henceforward) on another computer (called the target computer henceforward) than the one you used to develop (called the developer computer henceforward).

The steps heavily depends on your operating system.

Distribute and deploy on Windows

On Windows, the most difficult part is to list and get all the DLL dependencies that were used to build your package. If the developer computer is not cluttered with tons of software and libraries, deploying is easy thanks to four tools that are automatically installed during the [Windows setup]/docs/install/windows-setup/ : bash, copypedeps, windeployqt and 7z.

• on the developer computer
  • build and install your extension in %CAMITK_INSTALL_DRIVE%\%CAMITK_INSTALL_ROOT% (see [Windows setup]/docs/install/windows-setup/). In Microsoft Visual Studio, this is done for instance by building the INSTALL target in Debug and Release version.
  • Open a git bash prompt, change directory to %CAMITK_INSTALL_DRIVE%\%CAMITK_INSTALL_ROOT%\.. and run the following script:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Preparing..."
# assuming that %CAMITK_INSTALL_DRIVE%\%CAMITK_INSTALL_ROOT% ends with /install, change if needed
INSTALL_DIR=$(pwd)/install
SHORT_VERSION=$(ls $INSTALL_DIR/lib | cut -f2 -d-)

if [ ! -d "$INSTALL_DIR" ]; then
	echo "Install directory $INSTALL_DIR not found"
	exit
fi

echo "Creating package deployment directory"
PACKAGE_NAME=camitk-$SHORT_VERSION
PACKAGE_DIR=$(pwd)/$PACKAGE_NAME
rm -rf $PACKAGE_NAME
mkdir $PACKAGE_NAME
cd $PACKAGE_NAME

echo "Copying basic dependencies..."
copypedeps.exe -r $INSTALL_DIR/bin/camitk-imp.exe $PACKAGE_DIR

echo "Copying Qt dependencies..."
windeployqt.exe --release $INSTALL_DIR/bin/camitk-imp.exe --dir $PACKAGE_DIR

echo "Copying CamiTK libraries, extensions and user executables..."
cp -pR $INSTALL_DIR/lib $PACKAGE_DIR
cp -p  $INSTALL_DIR/bin/camitk-config.exe $PACKAGE_DIR
cp -p  $INSTALL_DIR/bin/camitk-actionstatemachine.exe $PACKAGE_DIR
cp -pR $INSTALL_DIR/bin/monitoring.dll $PACKAGE_DIR # specific case not detected by copypedeps

echo "Copying CamiTK extensions dependencies..."
for i in $INSTALL_DIR/lib/camitk-$SHORT_VERSION/*/*.dll; do
	echo "- copying $i dependencies..."
	copypedeps.exe -r -n $i $PACKAGE_DIR;
done
echo "- cleaning up..."
for i in $INSTALL_DIR/lib/camitk-$SHORT_VERSION/*/*.dll; do rm -f $(basename $i); done  # to remove the extension dll themselves
find $PACKAGE_DIR -name "*.lib" -exec rm {} \;

echo "Creating camitk5.zip..."
cd ..
rm -rf camitk-$SHORT_VERSION.zip
7z a -tzip camitk-$SHORT_VERSION.zip $PACKAGE_NAME

• on the target computer
  • extracted the camitk-$SHORT_VERSION.zip archive
  • run the application from the extracted directory

Distribute and deploy on Linux

Option 1 : build from source (recommended)

This is the most universal way of distributing your code. As the CamiTK setup on Linux is really simple thanks to Linux package manager, this is also quite fast although it requires access to the target computer.

• on the developer computer
  • build the camitk-mycep-package-source target. This will generate a source package archive ready to use.
• on the target computer
  • follow the the setup guide and installation guide
  • extract your source package archive ready
  • build it as you would do on the developer computer (add any specific dependencies if required)

Option 2 : using the official package version

On Linux, if you are using the official package for your distribution, these are the steps to follow on the other machine:

• on the developer computer
  • configure your CEP so that it is going to install in a specific isolated directory. This is done setting the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to an empty directory (e.g., cmake path/to/src -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/mycep)
  • build the global install target (i.e., cmake --build --target camitk-mycep-global-install). This will install all your build objects in the isolated directory
  • create an archive of this directory (e.g., mycep.tar.gz)
• on the target computer
  • install camitk-imp or camitk-actionstatemachine using the official package version
  • extract the archive
  • change directory to the top level extracted directory and run camitk-imp or camitk-actionstatemachine

Note on multiplatform support