libecl is a package for reading and writing the result files from the Eclipse reservoir simulator. The file types covered are the restart, init, rft, summary and grid files. Both unified and non-unified and formatted and unformatted files are supported.

libecl is mainly developed on Linux and OS X, in addition there is a portability layer which ensures that most of the functionality is available on Windows. The main functionality is written in C, and should typically be linked in in other compiled programs. libecl was initially developed as part of the Ensemble Reservoir Tool, other applications using libecl are the reservoir simulator flow and Resinsight from the OPM project.

In addition to the C code there are Python wrappers which make most of the libecl functionality available from Python. For small interactive scripts, forward models e.t.c. this is recommended way to use libecl functionality.

libecl uses CMake as build system:

git clone https://github.com/Statoil/*libecl*.git
cd *libecl*
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

If you intend to develop and change libecl you should build the tests by passing -DBUILD_TESTS=ON and run the tests with ctest.

Python is not a compiled language, but there is a basic "build system" which does a basic Python syntax check and configures some files to correctly set up the interaction between the Python classes and the shared libraries built from the C code.

You need to install some Python requirements before the Python code will work:

sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

The Python + cmake interaction is handled in a separate project called pycmake; you can either install that manually or use the git submodule functionality to fetch the correct version of pycmake into your libecl code:

git submodule update --init pycmake