You'll need a free OSS account to become part of the XBeach community. With this account you can access the Subversion repository to download the XBeach source code and the Matlab toolbox and access all other features of the XBeach community.

If you already have a OSS account, you are all set. If you do not have an account yet, please click on "Sign In" in the upper-right corner of this page to start registration. If you are already logged in, the link is not present and you are already registered.

If you want to start developing XBeach, you will need to upgrade your account to have write access to the Subversion repository. You can request such an update by contacting the development team.

It is also possible to start using XBeach without registration by just downloading a pre-compiled version of the source code and start modelling. However, in order to monitor the different fields of application of the model and thereby anticipate on the users of XBeach, registration is greatly appreciated.

To start modelling using XBeach, you will need to download it first. In principle, there are two options:

1. Download the XBeach source code and compile the executable yourself
2. Download a pre-compiled executable suitable for you operating system and needs

Download source code

In order to download the XBeach source code the following link to the subversion repos can be used:

https://svn.oss.deltares.nl/repos/xbeach/trunk

Subversion is a well-known version management system that allows you to always have the most recent source code at hand. It also allows developers to commit changes to the source code, without interferring with other developers. In order to use Subversion, you will need a Subversion client. A well-known client for Windows is Tortoise. If you have registered, you can download the source code via the following URL: https://svn.oss.deltares.nl/repos/xbeach/trunk.

You can download pre-compiled executables for Windows systems. XBeach is tested for 32-bit Windows versions and on a CentOS Linux system, that is closely related to the Red Hat Linux system. The available downloads are listed on Source code page. Please be aware that different versions of XBeach can be downloaded and that the most recent executables are not necessarily the most recent XBeach version.

As you will see on the download page, XBeach comes in different flavours. Next to the regular XBeach executable, you will find the following executables:

• MPI
• netCDF
• MPI + netCDF 

The MPI executable enables you to use a parallel programming application like MPICH2 to run XBeach over multiple processors and/or computers. The netCDF executable enables you to write XBeach output to a netCDF formatted file, which is particulary interesting for large models and publication of data. The last type of executable enables you to use both.

If you choose to download pre-compiled executables, you can skip the next step in the current menu .

XBeach is configured using a collection of files that hold information on the bathymertry, boundary conditions, model settings, etcetera. All files are plain text files that should be in a single directory, the model run directory. Running the XBeach executable in this directory, will make XBeach use those files and save the model output in the very same directory.

Setting up a model implies creating these files in any way of your preference. Common tools that are used to setup an XBeach model are:

• RFGrid and QuickIn

• Matlab and the OpenEarth Matlab toolbox for XBeach

• Python toolbox (https://xbeach-toolbox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

How these files should look like is described on the XBeach documentation website at:

https://xbeach.readthedocs.io

This website also provides some basic tutorials and example model schematizations.

You can run your model by simply executing the XBeach executable in the directory where you wrote your models settings to. This is the directory where the params.txt file is located. The model output will be a netCDF file (extension: NC).