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 a Conda environment (or an alternative virtual environment like venv).

The below instructions also use Mamba which is a very fast implementation of conda.

git clone <your fork>
cd pymmcore-plus
mamba create -n pymm-dev -c conda-forge python
conda activate pymm-dev
pip install -e ".[test,docs]"
pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

The -e . flag installs pymmcore_plusin "editable" mode and [test,docs] installs the optional dependencies you need for developing pymmcore-plus.

Note

pymmcore-plus is developed using the github flow. Using Git/GitHub can confusing , so if you're new to Git, you may find it helpful to use a program like GitHub Desktop and to follow a guide.

Also feel free to ask for help/advice on the relevant GitHub issue.

Contributing Documentation

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

# install docs dependencies
pip install -e ".[docs]"

# build docs and serve locally
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)

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()