The Vector SIL Kit is an open-source library for connecting Software-in-the-Loop Environments. This README is intended to provide you with quick start on how to build the Vector SIL Kit.

For documentation on using the Vector SIL Kit, see the HTML documentation, which can be generated when building the Vector SIL Kit (cf. Customizing the Build) and is provided in pre-built form with the SIL Kit packages.

The SIL Kit source and documentation is licensed under a permissible open source license, see LICENSE file. For licenses of third party dependencies, see ThirdParty/LICENSES.rst.

One of the design goals of SIL Kit is to easily connect different third-party tools, such as emulators, virtual machines and simulation tools.

The SIL Kit ecosystem comprises the following turn-key solutions:

• The SIL Kit Adapters for QEMU integrates with QEMU to support co-simulation with emulated targets.
• The SIL Kit Adapters for TAP devices project provides first-class support for TAP devices of the host operating system.
• The SIL Kit Adapter for SocketCAN can be used to attach a virtual CAN (Controller Area Network) interface (SocketCAN) to a Vector SIL Kit CAN bus.
• The SIL Kit FMU Importer allows to import Functional Mockup Units (FMUs) as SIL Kit participants.

The SIL Kit ecosystem also offers the following applications:

• The SIL Kit Dashboard collects, persists and displays information from different SIL Kit systems.

This section specifies the necessary steps to build the SIL Kit if you have just cloned the repository.

The first thing that you should do is initializing the submodules to fetch the required third party software:

git submodule update --init --recursive

The SIL Kit uses CMake for its build system. CMake can generate a platform specific project, e.g., a Visual Studio solution or Linux make files. To generate a project using the default project generator, create a build directory and configure CMake:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Once the project has been generated, you can build the SIL Kit using the project specific tools, e.g., by opening the generated Visual Studio or by running gnu make. You can also start the build process using CMake in a platform independent way:

cmake --build .

To install the SIL Kit to a previously configured location, run:

cmake --build . --target install

It is often helpful to specify a directory where the build should be installed. With CMake, this can be configured via the variable CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. E.g., to install the SIL Kit into a folder called "install" next to the build folder, run CMake as follows:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../install ..

There are also specific options to toggle details of the build:

1. SILKIT_BUILD_DOCS=ON (default: OFF) generates HTML documentation using Doxygen and Sphinx. Both must be installed beforehand. To install the needed dependencies use pip: pip3 install -r SilKit/ci/docker/docs_requirements.txt
2. SILKIT_BUILD_TESTS=OFF (default: ON) disables the generation of unit and integration tests. The tests are based on the GoogleTest framework, which is bundled with the SIL Kit.
3. SILKIT_BUILD_DEMOS=OFF (default: ON) disables the generation of demo applications for the SIL Kit.
4. SILKIT_BUILD_UTILITIES=OFF (default: ON) disables the generation of utility tools (sil-kit-registry, sil-kit-system-controller and sil-kit-monitor).

For example, if you want to build the SIL Kit with documentation enabled, call CMake in your build directory as follows:

pip3 install -r SilKit/ci/docker/docs_requirements.txt
pip3 install pipenv
cmake -D SILKIT_BUILD_DOCS=ON -B _build
cmake --build _build --target Doxygen