Building from Source

ngspice-bin is built inside a manylinux_2_28 (or manylinux_2_34) Docker container so the resulting binaries work on a wide range of Linux distributions.

Prerequisites

  • Docker (any recent version)

  • git with the repository cloned

  • Network access (the build downloads the NGSpice source tarball from SourceForge)

Local container build

Use the provided helper script:

./scripts/run_docker.sh [ngspice_version] [image]

For example:

# Build the latest release (46) in the default manylinux_2_28_x86_64 image
./scripts/run_docker.sh

# Build a specific version
./scripts/run_docker.sh 46

# Build in a different image
./scripts/run_docker.sh 46 manylinux_2_34_x86_64

Or invoke Docker directly:

docker run --rm \
    --volume "$(pwd):/io" \
    --env ngspice_version=46 \
    --env image=manylinux_2_28_x86_64 \
    --workdir /io \
    quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_28_x86_64 \
    /io/scripts/build.sh

The output tarball is written to release/.

Build script steps

scripts/build.sh performs the following steps:

  1. System dependencies — installs build tools (wget, bison, flex, gcc, gcc-c++, readline-devel, ncurses-devel, patchelf) via yum.

  2. Download — fetches ngspice-<version>.tar.gz from SourceForge.

  3. Configure — runs ./configure with --with-x=no, --enable-xspice, and --enable-cider.

  4. Build & install — make -j$(nproc) && make install into a local prefix.

  5. Bundle libs — copies non-standard shared libraries (libreadline, libtinfo, libgomp, libstdc++, libgcc_s) into install/lib/.

  6. Fix RPATH — uses patchelf to set $ORIGIN-relative RPATHs on the binary and all XSPICE plugins so the tarball is fully self-contained.

  7. Strip — strips the binary and shared libraries to reduce tarball size.

  8. Verify — runs a quick batch-mode smoke test (echo '.end' | ngspice -b -).

  9. Package — moves the install prefix to ngspice/, adds export.envrc, and creates release/ngspice-<image>-<version>.tar.gz.

Environment variables

Variable

Description

ngspice_version

NGSpice version number to build (e.g. 46). Required.

image

manylinux image name; used as the platform string in the tarball name. Defaults to linux.

BUILD_NUM

Appended to rls_version for traceability (set automatically by GitHub Actions to the workflow run ID).

rls_version

Override the full release version string (used by the manual Release workflow to produce clean 46 tags rather than 46.<run_id>).

CI / GitHub Actions

Two workflows are provided:

ci.yml

Triggered on every push, via workflow_dispatch, and on a weekly schedule (Sunday 12:00 UTC). Automatically detects the latest NGSpice version from SourceForge, builds on manylinux_2_28_x86_64 and manylinux_2_34_x86_64, and publishes a GitHub pre-release with the tarballs.

release.yml

Manually triggered via workflow_dispatch with an explicit ngspice_version input. Produces a proper (non-pre-release) GitHub Release.

Release layout

The unpacked release directory contains:

bin/
  ngspice
lib/
  libreadline.so.7
  libtinfo.so.6
  libgomp.so.1
  libstdc++.so.6
  libgcc_s.so.1
  ngspice/
    analog.cm
    digital.cm
    tlines.cm
    xtradev.cm
    xtraevt.cm
    spice2poly.cm
    table.cm
    ivlng.so
share/
  ngspice/
    scripts/
export.envrc