How do I build and use my own libMesh?

libMesh is supplied by our Conda installation. However, if you wish to build and use your own libMesh installation, you can use our update_and_rebuild_libmesh.sh script.

Due to having moose-libmesh installed, Conda creates and sets an influential environment variable LIBMESH_DIR that you would have to continually unset. It is therefore advisable to create a new Conda environment without moose-libmesh installed:

conda create --name custom-libmesh moose-petsc
conda activate custom-libmesh
cd ~/projects/moose/scripts
./update_and_rebuild_libmesh.sh

The above creates a new Conda environment: 'custom-libmesh', installs the needed PETSc dependency so we can build our own libMesh, activates it, and then builds libMesh.