Install

SciFortran is available in the form of a static Fortran library libscifor.a and the related Fortran module SCIFOR. Our build system relies on CMake. Experimental support for linking Intel’s MKL is provided, although it may fail on some systems.

Building SciFortran

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/SciFortran/SciFortran scifor

Optionally [1] define the fortran compiler:

export FC=mpif90/gfortran/ifort

From the repository directory (cd scifor) make a standard out-of-source CMake compilation:

GNU Make

Using GNU make is the default CMake workflow, with widest version support (CMake > 3.0). Note that parallel make execution is tested and working.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j

The CMake compilation can be customized using the following additional variables (default values between < >, optional in [ ]):

-DLONG_PREFIX = <yes>/no  #set a long or short prefix for the default installation directory

-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX    #specify custom installation prefix

-DUSE_MPI = <yes>/no        #set use of MPI

-DVERBOSE = yes/<no>

-DBUILD_TYPE = <RELEASE>/TESTING/DEBUG/AGGRESSIVE  #compilation options. TESTING:mild or no optimization, DEBUG:relevant debugging options, AGGRESSIVE: all debug options of (might not compile on  some systems)

-DWITH_BLAS_LAPACK = yes/<no>   # skip search of preinstalled linear algebra libraries and enforce compilation from local source

-DWITH_SCALAPACK = <yes>/no       #search and link to available ScaLAPACK library

Install SciFortran

System-wide installation is completed after the build step using either:

make install

To actually link the library to any of your project we provide different solutions:

• A generated environment module, installed to ~/.modules.d/scifor/<PLAT>/<VERSION>

• A generated bash script at <PREFIX>/bin/configvars.sh, to be sourced for permanent loading.

• A generated pkg-config file to, installed to ~/.pkgconfig.d/scifor.pc

which you can choose among by following the instructions printed on screen.

Binary releases for GitHub CI

Pushes to master-release build two prerelease assets: ubuntu-24.04-x86_64 and macos-15-arm64. The workflow reads the nearest version tag reachable from the pushed commit and the first eight characters of that commit’s SHA. Both the GitHub release tag and title have the form scifor-<version tag>-<sha8>; for example, scifor-4.23.13-1234abcd. Each asset is named scifor-<version tag>-<sha8>-<platform>.tar.gz. The full commit SHA is recorded in the release notes and BUILD-INFO. Push the desired commit from master to master-release when a binary release is wanted. The workflow only publishes after a push to master-release.

The archive contains lib/libscifor.a, Fortran .mod files under include, lib/pkgconfig/scifor.pc, and BUILD-INFO. It can be extracted into any directory. It does not contain the compiler, MPI, BLAS or LAPACK libraries. Install those dependencies with the same setup action used by the build.

In a downstream GitHub Actions job, use the SciFortran/checkout action. It installs GNU Fortran, Open MPI, BLAS/LAPACK and pkg-config, then selects and extracts the newest published binary release for an ubuntu-24.04 or macos-15 arm64 runner. To pin a particular release:

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-24.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - id: scifor
        uses: SciFortran/checkout@main
        with:
          release: scifor-4.23.13-1234abcd

Follow the action with the consuming project’s own configure and build steps. For a CMake project, run cmake -S . -B build before cmake --build build.

Omit with: release to use the most recently published scifor-* release. The action sets PKG_CONFIG_PATH, SFROOT, SCIFOR_ROOT, SCIFOR_RELEASE, LIBRARY_PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, INCLUDE_PATH, FC, GLOB_INC and GLOB_LIB for later steps in the same job, and provides release and root outputs. The uses: reference chooses the action version, while with: release chooses the binary package. To pin both, use a commit SHA in uses: and a release tag in with:.

For installation outside GitHub Actions, download the corresponding asset. For example on Ubuntu, after installing the same dependencies:

RELEASE=scifor-4.23.13-1234abcd  # Replace with a published release tag.
PLATFORM=ubuntu-24.04-x86_64
ASSET="${RELEASE}-${PLATFORM}.tar.gz"
gh release download "$RELEASE" --repo SciFortran/SciFortran \
  --pattern "$ASSET" --dir /tmp/scifor-download
mkdir -p "$HOME/opt"
tar -C "$HOME/opt" -xzf "/tmp/scifor-download/$ASSET"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/opt/${ASSET%.tar.gz}/lib/pkgconfig${PKG_CONFIG_PATH:+:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH}"
pkg-config --cflags --libs scifor

Choose macos-15-arm64 on a matching macOS runner. Use an explicit tag with gh release download: these CI builds are prereleases and are not marked as GitHub’s latest stable release.

Compile Fortran consumers using a compatible GNU Fortran version and the same MPI implementation. The asset’s BUILD-INFO records the build compiler and link flags. The .mod files are compiler-dependent; a package built on one runner is not a universal Linux or macOS binary package.

Uninstall

CMake does not officially provide uninstall procedures in the generated Make files. Hence SciFortran supplies a homebrew method to remove the generated files by calling (from the relevant build folder):

make uninstall

Known issues

SciFortran has been tested with success on several Unix/Linux platforms. Support for Windows, through WSL, is still experimental, although few people reported successful installation with minimal efforts.

Some have reported issues concerning the wrong setup for the library pkg-config file, contained in $PREFIX/<PLAT>/<VERSION>/etc/scifor.pc. The variable Libs=-L${libdir} -lscifor <blas/lapack/scalapack> produced by cmake during the configuration and installation process can be not properly defined for the part corresponding to third parties libraries such as Blas/Lapack/Scalapack. This breaks compilation against scifor whenever pkg-config is used to generate the linking options.

Tip

Corrupted pkg-config file can be fixed manually. Edit the scifor.pc file overwriting the definition of the variable Libs, as appropriate for your system.

footnotes

[1]

In some cases CMake fails to find the MPI fortran compiler, even if it is effectively installed and loaded into the system. An easy fix is to setup and export the FC=mpif90 environment variable before invoking the cmake <options> .. command.