Einstein Toolkit community:
I have completed a new, automated, and fast framework for testing individual or small groups of thorns within the Einstein Toolkit. Although it is developed with GitHub Actions in mind, it can be run locally. As I believe this may be useful for the community, I am sharing all the details in this email.
While the framework is developed for thorns generated with NRPy2, it can be simplified fairly straightforwardly for thorns developed by hand. Here's how it works:
With each push to the NRPy2 `main` branch, the following happens (as documented here: https://github.com/nrpy/nrpy/blob/main/.github/workflows/main.yml#L136): GitHub Actions first downloads an Apptainer (formerly Singularity) SIF image I have prepared here: https://github.com/nrpy/einsteintoolkit_ci_images/releases. The above image contains a recent (24.04) Ubuntu distribution with two pieces of software installed in /opt: 1. A *compiled* version of a recent (pre-2024-06 release) version of the Einstein Toolkit, with Baikal*, IllinoisGRMHD, WaveToyNRPy, and all other required thorns. 2. A recent NRPy2.
After downloading the above image, Actions runs a script that pulls the latest NRPy2 main branch, generates Baikal* and WaveToyNRPy thorns, overwrites these thorns in the Einstein Toolkit, and then compiles them within the Toolkit. Since other thorns are not compiled, this is a very quick check to ensure that updates to NRPy2-generated thorns do not break the compilation.
Finally, the Einstein Toolkit testsuite is run on each of these thorns. If any of the above steps ({download, thorn generation, compilation, testsuite}) fail, then GitHub Actions fails and it automatically sends me an unpleasant email.
We plan to extend the framework to CarpetX (Baikal*X and WaveToyNRPyX thorns) in the coming months, probably with a separate Apptainer image. Please feel free to use the Apptainer image available at https://github.com/nrpy/einsteintoolkit_ci_images/releases, or the script available at https://github.com/nrpy/nrpy/blob/main/.github/workflows/main.yml#L136 if you may find it useful. Everything here is open source.
This complements the very nice existing Einstein Toolkit testing framework ( https://einsteintoolkit.github.io/tests/), which builds the entire Toolkit automatically after any ET thorn or the flesh is updated. The full build requires about 90 minutes, whereas my testing framework is more limited in scope and completes in under 10 minutes (as it focuses only on a small collection of thorns).
-Zach
* * * Zachariah Etienne Assoc. Prof. of Physics, U. of Idaho Adjunct Assoc. Prof. of Physics & Astronomy, West Virginia U. https://etienneresearch.com https://blackholesathome.net