Configuring + Installing Chadwick for Parsing Retrosheet Data

This post assumes you've set up VirtualBox & Vagrant. If you have not completed this step, follow the steps outlined in my previous blog post: https://dev.to/jakenherman/setting-up-virtualbox-vagrant-5bm2.

The first thing we're going to do is open up our terminal and run cd baseball, which is the directory we created in the previous post.

After than, we need to get the .tar.gz that contains the Chadwick software installer and configuration files. To download this, go to the chadwickbureau GitHub page, the Chadwick repository, and navigate to the "Releases" page. Here's a quick link to take you there directly: https://github.com/chadwickbureau/chadwick/releases

Take the latest release in the .tar.gz format, and move that file into your baseball directory. Once the tar file is in your baseball directory, in your terminal run the command vagrant up, followed by vagrant ssh . 

Your terminal instance will now be running on your VirtualBox virtual machine. What we need to do now is move the tar file we downloaded earlier into the usr/local/src directory (this file will currently be sitting in ~/vagrant). We'll first navigate to the directory we're moving the file into by running the command cd /usr/local/src, then run the command below to copy the Chadwick tar file into the current directory (keep in mind, my file's version number is 0.8.1, but yours may be different - update your command accordingly):

Now that Chadwick has been copied and unpacked, we need to configure the software and complete the installation. To do this, run the configure file that you can see in the chadwick-0.8.1 directory when you run ls, then make to compile, make install to install the software to our virtual machine, and ldconfig to make sure the program can link to the libraries it needs:

To test that Chadwick was properly installed, run the cwevent command, and you should get the following output:

While this is technically an error, it means the installation was a success. cwevent is a command that Chadwick uses to parse Retrosheet event files, and since we've not yet provided one - we get this warning.

I hope this was helpful to you in your quest to begin working with Chadwick and Retrosheet. In the next post, we'll download our first few Retrosheet files and begin exploring.