TeraHz/docs/build.md

TeraHz build guide

The recommended way of getting TeraHz is the official SD card image provided under the releases tab in the GitHub repository. Installing TeraHz from source is a time consuming and painful process, even more so if you don't know what you're doing, and whatever you end up building will not be officially supported (unless you're a core developer).

With this warning out of the way, let's begin.

Getting the latest sources

The most reliable way to get working source code is by cloning the official GitHub repository and checking out the development-working tag. This tag marks the latest confirmed working commit. Building from the master branch is somewhat risky, and building from development branches is straight up stupid if you're not a developer.

After cloning and checking out, check the documentation for module dependencies and the required version of python in the docs/dependencies.md file.

Installing Python

This step depends a lot on the platform you're using. TeraHz was developed with Raspberry Pi and Raspbian in mind. If you're familiar with Raspbian enough, you'll know that the latest version of Python available is 3.5, which is too obsolete to run TeraHz and the required modules consistently.

After messing with Debian arm64 packages in the early development days I determined that the most reliable way of getting Python on Raspbian is compiling it from source. This part of the installation will take the largest portion of time, as compiling anything complex on the Raspberry is painfully slow.

If you're running an OS that provides a recent version of Python, great! You won't have to waste so much time waiting for the build process to finish.

The Python version TeraHz works best on is 3.6.8. To install it, download the gzipped tarball from the official Python website, and decompress it.