How to get WRF-SFIRE
- Back to the WRF-SFIRE user guide.
WRF-Fire is included in the Weather Research Forecasting model (WRF). The code is released yearly as a part of the WRF release. However, WRF-Fire is in active development, and the version of WRF-Fire in the WRF release can be over a year old and quite different from the current code.
We highly recommend getting the current development version from the developers directly. This is necessary if you want to get features that are not yet included in the WRF release, take advantage of the Howtos and utilities here, get support from us directly, or you want to have us add some feature for you.
The development version of WRF-Fire is stored in a git repository, currently hosted in the Amazon EC2 cloud. A git repository is a software version control system similar to CVS or SVN. In order to obtain the software from our repository, you must first download and install the git software. The default view of the repository is the head of the master branch, which should contain a current stable and working code at any time.
Developers can get write access to the cloud server on request, and must push changes to it.
Download
We strongly recommend to use download by git (as opposed to a tar or zip file, also available from the repository), because git allows easy updates and identification of the state of all files in case of problems. The following public, read-only mirrors are available.
- http://github.com/jbeezley/wrf-fire/
git clone git://github.com/jbeezley/wrf-fire.git
- http://gitorious.org/wrf-fire
git clone git://gitorious.org/wrf-fire/mainline.git
The home pages of the mirrors allow you to browse the source code as well as examine changes and view the different development branches. It is strongly recommended to use the git:// transport protocol in the git commands as above, not http://, which does not work reliably.
It is also possible to download the latest source code as a tarball or zip file from each mirror; however, this method is discouraged as it will be difficult to update to the latest version.
Update
You can update your files any time to the current version, without downloading all again. If you have downloaded your copy by git, do in your wrf-fire directory
git checkout master; git pull
If you have changed anything, the update will fail, and you have to commit your changes first by git commit -a. The git pull will then merge your changes with the new files from the repository. Please be sure you work with the latest files before contacting us for support. However, we may not be able to support code that you have changed.
Verify
To identify the version of files you have, do in your wrf-fire directory
git log
To verify your files,
git diff
will give no output if your files have not changed from the version identified by git log.