REST in Windows

We recommend a UNIX environment for development of REST-for-Physics libraries since most of the active developers maintain and contribute to REST using UNIX development environments. Still it exists the possibility to run and use REST inside Microsoft Windows.

Here you will find a quick recipe to get REST up and running in Windows. At least this is what I had to do to get it working.

  1. Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 (C++ developper tools)

  2. Execute Visual Studio and select to clone the REST-for-physics public framework repository.

  3. Open a terminal and place yourself at the directory where the repository was downloaded.

  4. Install python (You will be prompted with an installation window as soon as you try to execute the command).

  5. Install git for Windows and add the binary PATH manually, see the following link.

  6. Download ROOT 6.26.02 binaries for Visual Studio 2022 and 64 bits. Unzip it to a directory of your convenience (in the following this directory will be referred as ROOT_PATH).

  7. Inside Visual Studio enter into the top menu Project->CMake Settings and add the variable ROOT_DIR pointing to your downloaded ROOT binary path ROOT_PATH/cmake

  8. In the same configuration settings, at the “CMake command arguments”, add -CMAKE_MODULE_PATH=ROOT_PATH/cmake, where ROOT_PATH is the directory where you extracted the ROOT binaries.

  9. Add any REST libraries you are willing to use in the same line, e.g. -DRESTLIB_AXION=ON or -DREST_ALL_LIBS=ON.

  10. To re-run cmake just go to “Project->Configure cache”, and to build press F7.

The PR#231 inside the framework repository might give some light in case of problems.

If you succeed to install REST in Windows and think the previous instructions are not accurate enough, please do not hesitate to update them.