Setup Developer Environment

These instructions will take you through the minimal steps required to get a dev environment setup, so you can run the tests locally.

Clone the repository

First clone the repository locally using Git. There is a link on the GitHub interface to allow you to do this. SSH is recommended if you have setup a key. Enter the directory that it is cloned into to continue.

Install dependencies

You can choose to either develop on the host machine using a venv (which requires python 3.10 or later) or to run in a container under VSCode

Local virtualenv

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'

VSCode devcontainer

Ensure you have the vscode devcontainer extension installed.

If you are at DLS, then first setup podman and its fix for devcontainer features and then follow these instructions for setting up devcontainers on a DLS workstation.

code .

Click on ‘Reopen in Container’ when prompted on startup or, if vscode is already running, open the command menu with CTRL+SHIFT+P, search for and run ‘Reopen in Container’. Open a new terminal

Build and test

Now you have a development environment you can run the tests in a terminal:

tox -p

This will run in parallel the following checks:

• Build the docs using sphinx

• Run the tests using pytest

• Run static analysis using pyright or mypy

• Run linting using pre-commit