cfast-bin

The CFAST fire model, as a Python wheel.

cfast-bin is an unofficial repackaging of the NIST CFAST binaries. Each wheel ships the cfast executable that NIST built for that platform.

Usage

pip install cfast-bin
cfast model.in

From Python:

import subprocess
import cfast_bin

subprocess.run([cfast_bin.executable(), "model.in"], check=True)
print(cfast_bin.CFAST_BUILD)  # NIST build string, e.g. 8-Beta-343-gd3b43914c

Platforms

Platform	Requirement
Linux x86_64	glibc ≥ 2.34
macOS arm64	macOS ≥ 26
Windows x64	—

Requirements come from the NIST binaries and may change between CFAST versions.

Versioning

Versions follow CFAST, so 8.0.0 contains the binaries of the CFAST 8.0.0 release and 8.0.0.post1 is a packaging-only fix of it. Nightly builds are versioned 8.0.0.dev<N>, where N counts the CFAST commits since its CFAST-8-Beta tag.

Licenses

• CFAST is NIST software, distributed under the NIST notice. On Linux, the binary's RPATH is modified so that it finds the Intel runtime, and the wheel's NOTICE records this change.
• The Intel runtime on Linux is not bundled. It comes from the intel-cmplr-lib-rt dependency.
• macOS wheels include the GCC runtime libraries (libgfortran, libquadmath, libgcc_s), under the GPLv3 with the GCC Runtime Library Exception.
• The code of this repository is under the MIT license.

Development

uv run scripts/prepare.py --platform linux   # or macos, windows; --asset for a local bundle or URL
uv build --wheel
uv venv && uv pip install dist/*.whl pytest
.venv/bin/python -m pytest tests

prepare.py downloads the newest nightly bundle with gh and stages it into src/cfast_bin/. Extracting a macOS bundle outside macOS needs 7z.