CFD Online Discussion Forums - [OpenFOAM.org] Build OPENFOAM from Source and Debug with VisualCode

Hello Claudia

First compile OpenFOAM in debug mode. For that you have to set the following environment variable to Debug in
$WM_PROJECT_DIR/etc/bashrc before compiling OpenFOAM

Code:

# [WM_COMPILE_OPTION] - Optimised(default), debug, profiling, other:

# = Opt | Debug | Prof

export WM_COMPILE_OPTION=Opt  # change this to Debug

Tobias Holzmann have a video series in his website that touch on this (watch 2nd video).

Then you have to install VSCode and the C/C++ extension (from MicroSoft)...

Now, load OpenFOAM environment and open the VSCode in the root of your project,

Code:

cd path/to/my/project

of22 # or your version of Foam

code .

Next, open an arbitrary source file (at least one that contains a #include "..." statement). VSCode will probably issues warnings/errors that it can't find some header files.

Hover over one of the missing header files and click on the "Quick Fix..." and then click on the "Edit includePath settings". It will open a tab + create a .vscode directory in the root of the workspace. Close the tab! Open the file [font=courier]c_cpp_properties.json[font] and edit it as follows

Code:

{

            ...

            "includePath": [

                "${workspaceFolder}/**",

                "${env:FOAM_SRC}/**"

            ],

             ...

}

With this, VSCode can find all the source codes in the OpenFOAM libraries ($FOAM_SRC)...
If you have any other directories that contain source code, you can also put them here. for example

Code:

{

            ...

            "includePath": [

                "${workspaceFolder}/**",

                "${env:FOAM_SRC}/**",

                "${env:WM_PROJECT_USER_DIR}/src/**",

                "${env:WM_PROJECT_USER_DIR}/applications/solvers/mySolver/"

            ],

             ...

}

After you've done that, VSCode does some magic (look at the fire icon down in the bottom bar) and then you can jump around in the code. You can find definitions of most of the functions and variables (hopefully) by doing a right click and go to definition or go to references... (Note that this doesn't work in snippet files like "createFields.H")

If you also want to run & debug your code in VSCode, you can follow links below,