CRADLE

CRADLE acts as a local proxy for Thinknode

Build Requirements

Supported OSs and C++ Compilers

The following platforms/compilers are supported for building CRADLE:

• Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal), using GCC 10 or Clang 14, or higher
• Windows 10, using VS 2019 or higher

Other platforms (e.g., other Linux distros) will likely work with some adaptation.

CRADLE makes use of some C++20 features, so other compilers (or earlier versions of the supported compilers) likely won't work.

CMake

CRADLE is built using CMake and requires a relatively recent version. It's known to work on 3.18 and 3.19. It should work on more recent versions as well.

vcpkg

CRADLE uses vcpkg to manage dependencies. If you don't already have vcpkg, visit https://vcpkg.io/en/getting-started and following the instructions in the 'Install vcpkg' section for your OS. You don't need to follow any of the other instructions, but you should note the path at which you installed vcpkg as you'll need that for running CMake.

OCaml

CRADLE has a custom preprocessor that's written in OCaml, so the build process currently require OCaml to be installed. It can be installed available via a package manager.

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install -y ocaml-nox

Windows (via Chocolatey)

choco install ocpwin

Python

CRADLE uses Python (3.x) for some testing purposes.

Ubuntu

Python itself should be available by default. If necessary, install the virtualenv tool as follows:

sudo pip3 install virtualenv

You can then use the provided CRADLE script to set up a virtual environment and source it:

scripts/set-up-python.sh --python=python3
source .venv/bin/activate

Windows

Install Python 3.x however you prefer, e.g.:

choco install python3

No script is currently provided to set up a virtual environment on Windows, but you can do so yourself if you like.

Either way, you should install the following packages:

pip install gcovr pytest requests websocket-client msgpack pyyaml

Secrets

A couple of Thinknode secrets are currently required to build and test CRADLE. Be sure to acquire them. You have two options for passing them into the build system:

You can store them in environment variables:

• CRADLE_THINKNODE_TOKEN
• CRADLE_THINKNODE_DOCKER_AUTH

Or, alternatively, you can store them in files within the root cradle directory:

• .token
• .docker-auth

(Each file should contain just the secret string.)

Other Packages

Ubuntu

You may also need to install these packages:

sudo apt-get install zip pkg-config

Invoking CMake

Once you have everything set up, you can run CMake to generate your build files. The only tricky part about this is that you must include the vcpkg toolchain file.

Via the Command Line

cmake -Bbuild -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=[path to vcpkg]/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake .

or

cmake -Bbuild -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=[path to vcpkg]/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .

Within Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code provides CMake integration tools. CRADLE will work with these as long as you edit the cmake.configureArgs setting to include -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=[path to vcpkg]/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake. (This setting appears as Cmake: Configure Args in the Settings UI and can be updated at the workspace level if you prefer to keep it CRADLE-specific.)

Testing

You can build/run the unit tests using the unit_tests CMake target, either by selecting it in your IDE or invoking it with CMake:

cmake --build build --config Release --target unit_tests

(There is also an integration_tests target, but that is a bit outdated at the moment, and it's not really clear that the current form has any purpose in the project moving forward.)

Documentation

More documentation.