Geant4 Installation Guide

Scope of this Manual

Geant4 uses CMake to configure a build system for compiling and installing the toolkit headers, libraries and support tools. This document covers the basics of using CMake to build and install Geant4 together with an overview of the most commonly used advanced features. We also provide a basic overview of how to build an application that uses Geant4.

Whilst every effort has been made to make the build of Geant4 robust and reliable, the multitude of platforms and system configurations mean we cannot guarantee that problems will not be encountered on platforms other than those listed in Supported and Tested Platforms.

In case of issues with building and installing Geant4, we welcome questions as well as feedback via our HyperNews Forum. To help us deal with your problem as quickly as possible, please include as much detail as possible on the problem you have encountered. At minimum, you should let us know the platform and operating system version, C++ compiler type and version, CMake version, and any error messages. It also helps to list the sequence of commands you used so we can try and reproduce the issue.

If you feel you have found a genuine bug in the Geant4 CMake build, please report it to the CMake category on our Bugzilla. As with reports to HyperNews, please include as much information as possible so that we can triage the bug and track it down quickly. We also welcome general feature requests and feedback on the system.

Status of this Document

Guide for the installation and configuration of the Geant4 toolkit.

  • Rev 1.0: First sphinx version implemented for Geant4 Release 10.4, 8th Dec 2017
  • Rev 2.0: Updates and fixes in documentatio for Geant4 Release 10.4, 15th May 2018
  • Rev 3.0: Geant4 Release 10.5, 11th December 2018
  • Rev 3.1: Geant4 Updates and fixes - especially to search functionality, 5th March 2019