Development environment

Attention

TODO: This section needs attention! Please, help us contributing to this document.

Warning

TODO: Needs improvement here. i.e: virtualenvs, GPG, etc.

Installing dependencies

You need to install few dependencies before start coding:

$ sudo dnf install gcc python-devel enchant

Then install all the python dependencies:

$ make requirements-dev

Or if you already have pip installed, you can run directly:

$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Installing in develop mode

Since version 0.31.0, our plugin system requires Setuptools entry points to be registered. If you’re hacking on Avocado and want to use the same, possibly modified, source for running your tests and experiments, you may do so with one additional step:

$ python3 setup.py develop [--user]

On POSIX systems this will create an “egg link” to your original source tree under $HOME/.local/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages. Then, on your original source tree, an “egg info” directory will be created, containing, among other things, the Setuptools entry points mentioned before. This works like a symlink, so you only need to run this once (unless you add a new entry-point, then you need to re-run it to make it available).

Avocado supports various plugins, which are distributed as separate projects, for example “avocado-vt”. These also need to be deployed and “linked” in order to work properly with the Avocado from sources (installed version works out of the box).

You can install external plugins as you wish, and/or according to the specific plugin’s maintainer recommendations.

Plugins that are developed by the Avocado team, will try to follow the same Setuptools standard for distributing the packages. Because of that, as a facility, you can use make requirements-plugins from the main Avocado project to install requirements of the plugins and make develop-external to install plugins in develop mode to. You just need to set where your plugins are installed, by using the environment variable $AVOCADO_EXTERNAL_PLUGINS_PATH. The workflow could be:

$ cd $AVOCADO_PROJECTS_DIR
$ git clone $AVOCADO_GIT
$ git clone $AVOCADO_PROJECT2
$ # Add more projects
$ cd avocado    # go into the main Avocado project dir
$ make requirements-plugins
$ export AVOCADO_EXTERNAL_PLUGINS_PATH=$AVOCADO_PROJECTS_DIR
$ make develop-external

You should see the process and status of each directory.