topola/INSTALL.md

Installing Topola

Building and installing Topola from source

Note that running any of the below commands that start with cargo install will install a Topola binary on your system. We assume this is what most people coming here want. If you want to build and run Topola without installing it, skip these particular commands and follow the subsections named Building and running without installing.

By default, the installed version will have a release profile, whereas without installing the debug profile will be used by default.

Prerequisites

Building Topola from source requires git and cargo to be installed on your system. Follow the instructions in above links to obtain these.

Obtaining the source

Clone the repository:

git clone https://codeberg.org/topola/topola.git

Preparing to build

Change your working directory to your clone of Topola's repository:

cd topola

Command-line application

Run the following command to build and install Topola's command-line application:

cargo install --locked --path cli

The application will now be invokable from your terminal as topola.

Autorouting example

As an example, running the following commands will autoroute a KiCad project of a simple THT diode bridge rectifier:

cd tests/single_layer/tht_diode_bridge_rectifier/
topola tht_diode_bridge_rectifier.dsn

By default, the output filename is the input filename with extension changed to ses: tht_diode_bridge_rectifier.ses.

Viewing the results

You can view the results of the autorouting in KiCad if you have it installed. First, open the layout in the KiCad PCB Editor:

pcbnew tht_diode_bridge_rectifier.kicad_pcb

Then choose File > Import > Specctra Session... from the menu bar. In the newly opened file dialog, choose the file named tht_diode_bridge_rectifier.ses. This will load the autorouted traces.

Building and running without installing

If you chose not to install the command-line application, you can build and run it without installing by replacing the topola command with cargo run -p topola-cli --. Running the above autorouting example is then as follows:

cd tests/single_layer/tht_diode_bridge_rectifier/
cargo run -p topola-cli -- tht_diode_bridge_rectifier.dsn

Viewing the results is obviously the same.

Egui graphical user interface application

Topola has a graphical user interface (GUI) application written using the egui library and its paired eframe framework.

The following command will build and install Topola's GUI application:

cargo install --locked --path egui

You can then invoke the application from your terminal by running

topola-egui

Building and running without installing

If you chose not to install the GUI application, you can build and run it without installing by running

cargo run -p topola-egui

instead of the above topola-egui command.

Running Topola in a Web browser

Topola's GUI application can be built to and run in a Web browser using Trunk. If you have cargo-binstall on your system, you can install Trunk from binary with

cargo binstall trunk

Alternatively, you can build Trunk from source by running

cargo install trunk

To build and open Topola in your browser, run

trunk serve

This will work both with and without having the GUI application installed.

Automated tests

Topola has automated tests to make sure its basic functionalities work. To execute these, run

cargo test

Automated tests are run in debug profile.

Contracts

The feature described in this section works only in debug profile. If you are not interested in debugging, you can skip this section altogether.

When trying to locate the source of a bug, it may be helpful to enable contracts (yes, this Wikipedia article needs improvement), which are nothing else but somewhat enchanced assertions.

Unfortunately, the contracts library which we have been using enforces post-conditions via closures, which have deal-breaking limitations. To bypass these we have forked and modified it to use try blocks instead. The fork is vendored in the vendored/contracts/ directory.

However, try blocks are not present in stable Rust yet, so to use these you need to set up your toolchain to use a nightly version of Rust.

Nightly Rust

To use nightly Rust, run the following command:

rustup override set nightly

You can go back to stable with

rustup override unset

Enabling contracts

To enable contracts, simply add a --no-default-features switch. This switches off a default feature that prevents contracts from executing. For example, to build tests with contracts, simply run

cargo test --no-default-features

Of course, you can enable contracts for any build target. For instance, the following command will build the Egui application with debug profile and contracts enabled:

cargo build -p topola-egui --no-default-features