Issues with spack installation?

[gknapp1]

I've heard that there are issues with getting AdditiveFOAM working through spack installation from a couple people now. I'm making this thread as a place to discuss. The install is working for me, so I'm trying to figure out if this is an issue with individual user's spack configuration or actually an issue with the additivefoam spack package that I can't reproduce in my environment.

If you've tried and had issues with spack install for AdditiveFOAM, please comment here.

Reposting this here from #48
@KDSisco:

note: I have never gotten the SPACK install to work, however I assume it has always been an issue on my end because it cannot find a FORTRAN compiler, but recently learned that multiple users have been having trouble installing via spack. (I know this isn't helpful, but just a heads up.)

[gknapp1]

A quick note, while the AdditiveFOAM spack package should have been working before now if you were only installing one version, there was some unexpected behavior if you installed more than one version of AdditiveFOAM via spack. This bug was fixed in spack as of a few weeks ago (mid-May 2025).

If you are starting from scratch, you can install spack following their installation instructions. After that install the desired AdditiveFOAM version, e.g., version 1.1.0, by using:

spack install additivefoam@1.1.0 -j6

The number of processors is set by the -j parameter (-j6 is 6 processors) and should be changed as appropriate for your system. This can take a while since it has to install OpenFOAM-10 in the spack environment as well. After a successful installation, you can load the AdditiveFOAM spack module and test that additiveFoam is on your system path by using:

spack load additivefoam@1.1.0
which additiveFoam

Whenever you load the AdditiveFOAM spack package, the spack-installed OpenFOAM-10 package will be sourced automatically. So, you will have access to all of the standard OpenFOAM command line tools as well (decomposePar, recomposePar, etc.) whenever you load the AdditiveFOAM spack package.