Development Setup

Note

This section is for you if you are intending to develop for COMPAS. If you just want to use it, please check out the user Installation guide.

Tools

To get started you would need to install the following tools:

  • Text/code editor

  • Git

  • Python (virtual environment)

Text/code editor

While any text editor can be used for developing COMPAS, we recommend using Visual Studio Code. It is free to use, open source and has a lot of useful features for developing python code.

Git

For version control we use git. Our remote repository is hosted on GitHub

While git offers an extensive command line interface, there are plentty of GUI based clients out there including:

VS Code also has a built-in git client

../_images/vscode_git.JPG

Python virtual environments

During development there might be a need to install different versions of different dependencies, some of them might conflict with ones used for other projects. Moreover, using early development code can often lead to a corrupt python environment which can be hard to fix. For these reasons it is highly recommended to use virtual environments for development.

For developing COMPAS we recommend using conda.

Installing COMPAS for development

See the Development Workflow for more details on how to install COMPAS for development and how to contribute to the project.