Building NMRFx

NMRFx is largely written in the Java programming language. Some command line based tools are written in Python and execute using the embedded Jython (Python in Java) intepreter.

Building NMRFx requires the installation of several tools on your computer. Depending on your OS, you may have some of these already. NMRFx can be built on MacOS, Linux and Windows. We primarily build and test on MacOS and Linux.

Since the source code is hosted on Github you'll need to have the Git version control system installed. One source of information on installing Git is here
Since NMRFx is written in the Java programming language you need to have the JDK (Java Development Kit) installed. There are various sources of OpenJDK (the open source version). We generally build with one from Azul. Not all downloads of Java include JavaFX, the GUI toolkit. It's easiest to build NMRFx if you choose one that does. At the Azul download site you can select your Java version, operating system, architecture, and Java package. For the latter choose "JDK FX". We generally use recent versions of the JDK. At present (NMRFx 11.4.32) we are using JDK version 24, but JDK 25 should also work.
The build (downloading dependencies, compiling the source code, and building packages) is done with Maven. You can find installation instructions here. We use Homebrew on MacOS to intall it.

Once you have all the required tools you can download and build NMRFx.

The source code is available on Github. You can clone it to your computer with git. First move to an appropriate folder on your computer. The software will be downloaded into a directory (within your current directory) named nmrfx.

git clone https://github.com/nanalysis/nmrfx.git
Build the software by moving into the nmrfx directory and run maven. Use the skipTests argument to tell maven to skip running our test suite. Performing the tests requires downloading a set of test NMR files and requires installation of the optional lfs package for Git.

mvn -DskipTests clean install
You can execute NMRFx by running the nmrfx shell script (or nmrfx.bat on Windows). It will be located in a directory like (depending on version):

nmrfx-analyst-gui/target/nmrfx-analyst-gui-11.4.33-SNAPSHOT-bin/nmrfx-analyst-gui-11.4.33-SNAPSHOT/nmrfx

The NMRFx source code is contained in six different modules

nmrfx-core: Core routines for datasets, peaks and projects (also used by RING NMR Dynamics).
nmrfx-utils: Various utilities (also used by RING NMR Dynamics)
nmrfx-structure: Molculear structure code including structure calculation and chemical shift prediction
nmrfx-analyst: Processing, dataset and peak tools
nmrfx-analyst-gui: Graphical user interface
nmrfx-plugin-api: Code for loading plugins

NMRFx can be run with three different shell (or Windows batch) scripts

nmrfx: Starts up the full graphical user interface (as described above). The script is contained in a sub-directory of the nmrfx-analyst-gui target folder
nmrfxa: Runs non-gui tools (for example, for command line processing). The script is contained in a sub-directory of the nmrfx-analyst target folder
nmrfxs: Runs non-gui tools for structure calculation and chemical shift prediction. The script is contained in a sub-directory of the nmrfx-structure target folder

Building full installers is not part of the open-source code.

We welcome contributions of source code, but recommend that users contact us before engaging in any significant projects. The source code is still under rapid development so its good if we are aware of external projects.