Getting ready to develop

Get the code

Details of how to get the code can be found in the contributing chapter. If you are reading this, you have probably already done this step.

You also need to work a little bit within the terminal. If you are not familiar with this, you should try to get some basic knowledge on that before you continue.

And, you will need to have a IDE (integrated development environment) installed. Good alternatives are PyCharm (https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/) and VSCode (https://code.visualstudio.com/).

Install python 3.10 or higher

There are many ways to install python. We recommend using the Miniconda distribution. You can download it from here: https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html

From the conda website: “Miniconda is a free minimal installer for conda. It is a small, bootstrap version of Anaconda that includes only conda, Python, the packages they depend on, and a small number of other useful packages, including pip, zlib and a few others.”

The main benefit of using conda is that it makes it easy to install and manage packages and environments. It also makes it easy to install packages that are not available on PyPI (the Python Package Index), including for example pandoc which is needed to build the documentation.

Create a development environment

Once you have installed conda, you should create a new environment for developing cellpy. Take a look at the documentation for conda to learn more about environments and how to use them if you are not familiar with this concept.

The easiest way to create a working environment is to use the dev_environment.yml file in the root of the cellpy repository. This will generate an environment called cellpy_dev with all the packages needed to develop cellpy. You can create the environment by running the following command in a terminal:

conda env create -f dev_environment.yml

You can then activate the environment by running:

conda activate cellpy_dev

Next, you need to install cellpy in development mode. This is done by running the following from the root folder of cellpy:

python -m pip install -e . # the dot is important!

Installing cellpy in development mode means that you can edit the code and the changes will be reflected when you import cellpy in python. This is very useful when developing code, since you can test your changes without having to reinstall the package every time you make a change.

As a final check, you should check if the tests don’t fail (still being in the root directory of cellpy):

pytest .

Fingers crossed! If the tests pass, you are ready to start developing!