3.2 Configuring Elephant

Before you can load the elephant packages into your running lisp, you need to setup the configuration file. Copy the reference file config.sexp from the root directory to my-config.sexp in the root directory. my-config.sexp contains a lisp reader-formatted list of key-value pairs that tells elephant where to find various libraries and how to build them.

For example:

     #+(and (or sbcl allegro) macosx)
     ((:berkeley-db-include-dir . "/opt/local/include/db45/")
      (:berkeley-db-lib-dir . "/opt/local/lib/db45/")
      (:berkeley-db-lib . "/opt/local/lib/db45/libdb-4.5.dylib")
      (:berkeley-db-deadlock . "/opt/local/bin/db45_deadlock")
      (:compiler . :gcc))

The following is a guide to the various parameters. For simplicity, we include all the parameters here, although we will go into more detail in each of the data store sections.

• :compiler – This tells Elephant which compiler to use to build any C libraries. The only options currently are :gcc on Unix platforms and :cygwin for the Windows platform.
• :berkeley-db-include-dir – The pathname for the Berkeley DB include files (db.h)
• :berkeley-db-lib-dir – The pathname for all the Berkeley DB library files
• :berkeley-db-lib – The full pathname for the specific Berkeley DB library (libdb45.so)
• :berkeley-db-deadlock – The full pathname to the BDB utility function db_deadlock
• :pthread-lib – Not needed for SBCL 9.17+
• :clsql-lib – Currently unused, adds paths to the CL-SQL library search function

The config.sexp file contains a set of example configurations to start from, but you will most likely need to modify it for your system.

Elephant has one small C library that it uses for binary serialization. This means that you need to have gcc in your path (see Elephant on Windows for exceptions on the Windows platform).