It is recommended to compile PhASAR yourself in order to get the full C++ experience and to have full control over the build mode. However, you may also want to try out one of the pre-built versions of PhASAR or the Docker container.

As a shortcut for the very first PhASAR build on your system, you can use our bootstrap script. Please note that you must have python installed for the script to work properly.

./bootstrap.sh

Note: If you want to do changes within PhASAR, it is recommended to build it in Debug mode:

./bootstrap.sh -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

The bootstrap script may ask for superuser permissions (to install the dependencies); however it is not recommended to start the whole script with sudo.

For subsequent builds, see Compiling PhASAR.

Set the system's variables for the C and C++ compiler to clang:

export CC=/usr/local/bin/clang
export CXX=/usr/local/bin/clang++

You may need to adjust the paths according to your system. When you cloned PhASAR from Github you need to initialize PhASAR's submodules before building it:

git submodule update --init

If you downloaded PhASAR as a compressed release (e.g. .zip or .tar.gz) you can use the init-submodules-release.sh script that manually clones the required submodules:

utils/init-submodules-release.sh

Navigate into the PhASAR directory. The following commands will do the job and compile the PhASAR framework:

mkdir build
cd build/
cmake -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
ninja -j $(nproc) # or use a different number of cores to compile it
sudo ninja install # only if you wish to install PhASAR system wide

When you have used the bootstrap.sh script to install PhASAR, the above steps are already done. Use them as a reference if you wish to modify PhASAR and recompile it.

After compilation using cmake the following two binaries can be found in the build/tools directory:

• phasar-cli - the PhASAR command-line tool (previously called phasar-llvm) that provides access to analyses that are already implemented within PhASAR. Use this if you don't want to build an own tool on top of PhASAR.
• myphasartool - an example tool that shows how tools can be build on top of PhASAR

Please be careful and check if errors occur during the compilation.

When using CMake to compile PhASAR the following optional parameters can be used:

You can use these parameters either directly or modify the installer-script bootstrap.sh

C++'s long compile times are always a pain. As shown in the above, when using cmake the compilation can easily be run in parallel, resulting in shorter compilation times. Make use of it!

To test if everything works as expected please run the following command:

$ phasar-cli -m test/llvm_test_code/basic/module_cpp.ll -D ifds-solvertest

You can find the phasar-cli tool in the build-tree under tools/phasar-cli.

If you obtain output other than a segmentation fault or an exception terminating the program abnormally everything works as expected.

Due to unfortunate updates to MacOS and the handling of C++, especially on the newer M1 processors, we can't support native development on Mac. The easiest solution to develop PhASAR on a Mac right now is to use dockers development environments. Clone this repository as described in their documentation. Afterwards, you have to login once manually, as a root user by running docker exec -it -u root <container name> /bin/bash to complete the rest of the build process as described in this readme (install submodules, run bootstrap.sh, ...). Now you can just attach your docker container to VS Code or any other IDE, which supports remote development.

PhASAR can be installed using the installer scripts as explained in the following. However, you do not need to install PhASAR in order to use it.

In the following, we would like to give an complete example of how to install PhASAR using an Ubuntu or Unix-like system.

Therefore, we provide an installation script. To install PhASAR, just navigate to the top-level directory of PhASAR and use the following command:

./bootstrap.sh --install

The bootstrap script may ask for superuser permissions.

Done!

If You have already built phasar, you can just invoke

sudo ninja install