Building from Source

Build the SSC and SAM_api libraries

If this is your first time building NREL-PySAM from source, you will need to build the SAM_api libraries. In order to do this, run the SAM build steps with the following modifications:

1. When cloning repositories (step 5.2), also clone pysam (this repository) in the same directory. The cloned folder should be named pysam.

2. When setting environment variables (step 6.3), add one additional variable for pysam:

   PYSAMDIR

   ...\sam_dev\pysam

3. Build SAM_api

   Create a build folder and change directory to it.

   • Windows

     Run the CMake command to generate the visual studio solution:

     cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -DCMAKE_CONFIGURATION_TYPES="Debug;Release" -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION=10.0 -DSAM_SKIP_TOOLS=1 -DSAM_SKIP_TESTS=1 -DSAMAPI_EXPORT=1 -DSAM_SKIP_AUTOGEN=1 -DSAMPRIVATE=0 .. 
     

     Start VS 2022 and open the system_advisor_model.sln solution file. You only need to build the SAM_api project in the Release configuration. Doing an entire build including exporting the API takes upwards of 45 minutes.

     Alternatively, run the build from command line:

     devenv /build Release system_advisor_model.sln /Project SAM_api
     

   • Linux and Mac

     cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DSAMAPI_EXPORT=1 -DSAM_SKIP_AUTOGEN=1
     cmake --build . --target SAM_api -j 6
     

Once the build is finished, you should have the SAM and ssc libraries relevant to your system (libssc.so and libSAM_api.so on Unix and ssc.dll, ssc.lib and SAM_api.dll, SAM_api.lib on Windows) in the folder pysam/files

Installing NREL-PySAM Locally

Once you have completed the first time setup, you are ready to install pysam in your local Python environment.

From the pysam folder, run:

python -m pip install .

This will compile the pysam c files, and copy files from the SAM API into files/defaults. In order to test the installation, run:

pip install -r tests/requirements.txt
pytest -s tests

Shell scripts

The shell scripts build_unix.sh is intended to be run on a Mac with Docker installed. build_unix.sh will build the distributions for Mac then use a manylinux1 container to run build_manylinux.sh. The resulting .whl files will be in pysam/dist.

On Windows, the batch script build_win.bat accomplishes the same.