Development Environment & Toolchain Setup

Quick Start

For automated setup, run the setup script:

./scripts/setup_dev.sh

This will check for all required tools and automatically install dependencies. For manual setup or troubleshooting, see the detailed requirements below.

Languages

The following tools are essential for development. Whilst we do not enforce version management for language interpreters / compilers the following languages are used in this project and must have at least the standard toolchain available

  • Python (>= 3.12)
  • Ruby

System

  • git - Version control
  • make - Task runner
  • Xcode - macOS IDE for various edge case tasks
  • editorconfig - Enforcing setups

Python

  • uv - Package and virtual environment management, Python version management
  • ruff - Python linter
  • briefcase - Compiler and packaging tool for the Toga framework

Ruby

  • bundler - Ruby gem
  • jekyll - Static site engine

Manual Setup

If you prefer manual setup or need to troubleshoot:

Python Environment

# Install uv if not present
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# Create virtual environment and install dependencies
uv venv
uv sync

# Install ruff for linting
uv pip install ruff

Ruby Environment (for documentation)

# Install bundler if not present
gem install bundler

# Install Jekyll and dependencies
cd docs
bundle install

Verification

# Test the app runs
make dev

# Test the docs site
cd docs && bundle exec jekyll serve

For more automation scripts, see the scripts directory.