Interactive Python CLI Wizard for Generating SU2 .cfg Files

[AhmedMoustafaa]

Hi everyone,

While going through the SU2 codebase for my GSoC proposal, I put together a Python CLI tool to make generating .cfg files a bit easier and less error-prone: SU2-wizard.

Instead of hardcoding the settings, the script parses config_template.cfg and option_structure.hpp to build a database of the options (currently handling all 689 for v8.4.0).

A few things it currently does:

• Conditional filtering: Hides irrelevant options based on earlier inputs (e.g., skips turbulence models if EULER is selected, or hides incompressible options for compressible flows).
• Inline help: You can type ? at any prompt or use /keyword to pull the description, default value, and valid choices directly from the source definitions.
• Annotated output: The final .cfg generates with comments explaining the chosen options.

ezgif-2ea1ad2c795a65c0_1.mp4

I wanted to share this here to see if others find it useful.

Also, a question for the maintainers: is this something that would be useful to integrate and ship directly with SU2, perhaps in the Python utilities directory? If there's interest, I'd be happy to open a PR and work on adding the conflict detection rules from SetPostprocessing().

[pcarruscag]

Hi, this would be good to build into SU2, if we can represent the logic of what options are active directly in C++, or in python and generate the C++ from python, maintaining the logic in two languages would be a no go for me.

[AhmedMoustafaa]

Hey pedro, I think I can see your point. I'll look into it and study both options to see what the most practical approach would be for this.

[bigfooted]

The most difficult thing I think is to represent the dependencies properly and do validation checking. We implemented a basic validator in the GUI. However, a generalization that can be used by the SU2_CFD solver as well as the GUI would be preferred. I looked at jsonvalidator, but I am not sure if it is truly up for the task. If the options and dependencies can be somehow stored in a human-readable file and read by a validator routine, that would be a good option. I can check out the GUI code to see what was done there.