fm-weck: Run formal methods tools in containerized environments

fm-weck is a command line tool and library that makes the execution of formal methods tools easy. fm-weck downloads the tools and caches them for later use.

We provide a tutorial on how to use fm-weck here.

Install dependencies

fm-weck requires Python 3.10 or higher. fm-weck relies on an available Podman or Docker installation. To install Podman on Ubuntu, run the following command:

sudo apt install podman

Modes of Operation

There are three modes of operation: run, shell and expert.

• run: (Recommended) enables plug-and-play execution of formal methods tools: it downloads and unpacks a tool from the fm-tools metadata file into a user-specified cache directory on the host system and then runs the tool in the containerized environment
• expert: executes a tool in it’s containerized environment specified through the corresponding fm-tools YAML file: All arguments are passed verbatim to the tool.
• shell: enters an interactive shell inside of the container specified by the given tool

Development and Testing

When using any command with the fm-weck <cmd> toolname ... syntax, the tool name is searched in src/fm_weck/resources/fm_tools. During the build process of the .whl file for fm-weck, the fm_tools/data directory is copied to that location. When running or developing fm-weck from the git repository, the user must make sure that the contents of fm_tools/data directory are available in the src/fm_weck/resources/fm_tools directory.

In Linux this can be done by running the following command in the root directory of the project:

ln -s $(pwd)/fm_tools/data $(pwd)/src/fm_weck/resources/fm_tools

Publications

A paper about fm-weck has been accepted at the FM ’24 conference.

• FM-Weck: Containerized Execution of Formal-Methods Tools, by Dirk Beyer and Henrik Wachowitz. Proc. FM. Springer (2024). doi:10.1007/978-3-031-71177-0_3