Developer guide

This set of pages contains guidelines, instructions, and explanations related to GROMACS development. The actual code is documented in Doxygen documentation linked from the front page of the documentation.

The focus is (at least for now) on things that are tightly tied to the code itself, such as helper scripts that reside in the source repository and organization of the code itself, and may require the documentation to be updated in sync.

The guide is currently split into a few main parts:

• Overview of the GROMACS codebase.
• Collection of overview pages that describe some important implementation aspects.
• Generic guidelines to follow when developing GROMACS. For some of the guidelines, scripts exist (see below) to automatically reformat the code and/or enforce the guidelines for each commit.
• Instructions on what tools are used, and how to use them.

• Codebase overview
  • Source code organization
  • Documentation organization
• Build system overview
  • Build types
  • CMake cache variables
  • External libraries
  • Special targets
  • Passing information to source code
• Relocatable binaries
  • Finding shared libraries
  • Finding data files
  • Known issues
• Documentation generation
  • Building the GROMACS documentation
  • Needed build tools
• Style guidelines
  • Guidelines for code formatting
  • Guidelines for #include directives
  • Naming conventions
  • Allowed language features
  • Using Doxygen
  • Guidelines for creating meaningful redmine issue reports
  • Guidelines for formatting of git commits
  • Error handling
• Development-time tools
  • Using Doxygen
  • Understanding Jenkins builds
  • releng repository
  • Source tree checker scripts
  • Automatic source code formatting
  • Unit testing
  • Change management
  • Build system
  • Code formatting and style