Development setup

This section outlines how to set up a development environment for kiara. For now, it is basically a description of how I setup my own environment, so you might or might not have to adapt some of those steps to your own needs, depending on the tools you use for Python development.

Code checkout

The first step is to decide which source code repositories to check out. In most cases, you'll want to check out at least the following repositories:

• kiara
• kiara_plugin.core_types

In addition, it usually also makes sense to check out at least the tabular plugin, and probably the others as well, depending on what exactly you want to achive, and in which areas you want to work in:

• kiara_plugin.tabular
• kiara_plugin.onboarding
• kiara_plugin.network_analysis
• kiara_plugin.language_processing

Then there are the more frontend focussed projects:

• kiara_plugin.html
• kiara_plugin.service
• kiara_plugin.streamlit

Script

I've written a script to partly automate the process:

Feel free to adapt it to your needs (for example, fork the repos you are in on Github, and change the GITHUB_USER variable to your own), and run it locally (on Linux or MacOS). You can start of with disabling most project repositories, and uncomment/add them later on, as needed, and re-run.

Before you run this script, make sure you have a virtualenv (or conda env) activated, otherwise the packages would be installed into your gloabl Python environment.

IDE setup

This depends on your IDE, obviously. I use PyCharm, so what I do usually is:

• create a conda environment, activate it
• create the project base directory, cd into it
• run the checkout script above
• open PyCharm, and create a new project:
• select your newly created base folder as project root directory
• select my conda/virtualenv as 'existing' Python environment
• now, go through all sub-projects, individually, and mark the src folder as 'Sources Root' (right-click on the folder, select 'Mark Directory as' -> 'Sources Root'), and tests as 'Tests Sources Root"

I chose this setup instead of a monorepo because it makes it easier to release plugin packages independently of core kiara, as well as other plugin packages they might depend on. It makes setting up a development environment a bit harder (which is usually a one-time thing), and it requires to do git commits/pushes/pulls independently for each sub-project, but so far the trade-off has been worth it.

Personally, I use mu-repo to manage multiple repositories like this, and it helps a bit cutting down in management tasks, I know there are other tools out there like this.