Contributing

Thanks for thinking of a way to help improve this library! Remember that contributions come in all shapes and sizes beyond writing bug fixes. Contributing to documentation, opening new issues for bugs, asking for clarification on things you find unclear, and requesting new features, are all super valuable contributions.

Contributing Code

All development for this library happens in the pymmcore-plus/pymmcore-plus repo on GitHub. We recommend you work with uv, but any virtual environment manager should work.

Using uv:

git clone <your fork>
cd pymmcore-plus
uv sync
pre-commit install

uv run pytest 

or activate the virtual environment (source .venv/bin/activate on Linux/macOS, .venv\Scripts\activate on Windows) and run:

pytest

If using a different virtual environment manager (like conda) instead of uv, you can install the dependencies with:

pip install -e . --group dev

This requires a newer version of pip (>= 25.1) to work.

Contributing Documentation

Our documentation is built with mkdocs from the files in the docs folder. To build docs locally:

# build docs and serve locally
uv run --group docs mkdocs serve

The docs should be live at http://127.0.0.1:8000 and will update automatically as you edit and save them.

Developing on Apple Silicon

To build a native version of the DemoCamera for local testing on apple silicon, you can run the following command (you must have homebrew installed)

uv run mmcore build-dev

This will download the micro-manager repo, build it, and drop the DemoCamera and Utilities devices into a folder in your pymmcore-plus install folder (by default ~/Library/Application Support/pymmcore-plus/mm). This path is on the default search path so you should be good to go. You can confirm by running:

from pymmcore_plus import CMMCorePlus

core = CMMCorePlus()
core.loadSystemConfiguration()
core.snap()