Using a Custom Python Installation

The following instructions are guidelines on how to run Basilisk with a computer that is not using a system installed version of Python. First some general notes:

• Basilisk must be built and run with the same Python binary.

• For Unix platforms Cmake should select the default installed version of Python.

To run cmake with the custom python installation that is not found by the system by default, the path to the python installation can be provided as a command line argument. Using a BASH shell and from within dist3 folder, to compile with Python 3 you can use:

cmake ../src -G "Xcode" -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=$(python3-config --prefix)/lib/libpython3.7.dylib -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=$(python3-config --prefix)/include/python3.7m -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=$(python3-config --exec-prefix)/bin/python3.7

Note that the above command didn’t work from a tcsh shell environment. The python3-config command and package allows for easy configuring of what python to use.