These pages are for people interested in using the development copy of PETSc or contributing to the PETSc libraries. This information is intended only for people who are experienced with building, using, and debugging PETSc. If you cannot use makefiles, a debugger, and EMACS etags, then please don't access these pages.

Consider joining petsc-dev mailing-list.

How to:

Browsing source:

One can browse the development repositories at the following location

Obtaining the development version of PETSc:

Install Git if it is not already installed on your machine, then obtain PETSc with the following: PETSc can now be configured in the usual way, specified on the Installation page. To update your copy of petsc Once updated, you will usually want to rebuild completely For additional help use If you absolutely cannot use git then you can access tarballs directly from 'master' branch. or access the nightly tarball snapshot

Compiling and using the development copy of PETSc:

Use ./configure to install PETSc. If you have problems, please use the petsc-dev mailing list.

Building documentation:

The documentation tools listed below (except for pdflatex) are automatically downloaded and installed by ./configure.

Note: sowing and c2html have additional dependencies like gcc, g++, and flex and do not use compilers specified to PETSc configure. [Windows users please install the corresponding cygwin packages]

Once pdflatex (e.g., from TeX Live) is in your PATH, you can build the documentation with:

Submitting code for inclusion in PETSc:

See https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/wiki/Home for how to contribute code to PETSc.

Please read the code standards chapter of the developer guide before submitting code.

Please refer to the PETSc developer wiki for detailed instructions on submitting code.

Once you have gained experience with developing PETSc source code, you can become an active member of our development and push changes directly to the petsc repository. Send mail to [email protected] to arrange it.

Developer guide:

The developer guide gives an overview of the design and detailed style specifications.

Nightly builds:

The logs for the nightly builds at

  • http://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/petsc/nightlylogs/index.html

    • The coverage(what lines of source code are tested in the nightly builds) can be found at

  • http:/www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-master/index_gcov1.html

    • Getting a Tarball of the git master branch of PETSc

    Use the following URL:

    This mode is useful if you are on a machine where you cannot install Git or if it has a firewall blocking http downloads.

    After the tarballs is obtained - do the following:

    To update this copy of petsc, re-download the above tarball. The URL above gets the latest changes immediately when they are pushed to the repository.

    Getting the Nightly tarball of the git master branch of PETSc

    The nightly tarball will be equivalent to the release tarball - with all the doumentation built. Use the following URL: To update your copy of petsc simply get a new copy of the tar file. The tar file at the ftp site is updated once each night [arround midnight CST] with the latest changes to the development version of PETSc.