Developer Setup for Portmod

There are a few additional requirements beyond what is necessary to run portmod if you want to develop portmod.

First, you need a local version of the git repository. You probably want to fork the project, and clone your fork rather than cloning portmod itself.

In addition to the normal runtime requirements, you will also need:

pytest (at least, to run tests locally after you’ve made changes, which you need to do).
setuptools_scm (needed for getting the version number of your local development version).
setuptools_rust (needed for compiling the native library).

Note that working with the development version means you’ll need to compile the rust native extension yourself, hence Rust is a required dependency. See the notes included on the Installing Portmod page.

Pip editable install

You can use the command pip install --editable .[test] from within your local copy of the repository to install both the regular dependencies and the above development dependencies, in addition to linking to this version of portmod from within site-packages.

Note that this will not be able to coexist with an installed release version of portmod, and you will need to uninstall it prior to installing in non-editable mode.

Manual setup

There are executable files that mimic all of portmod’s entry points in the bin directory in the root of the project. You can execute those manually, or add the directory to your path to be able to run portmod commands using your development version.

Native Library

A native rust library is compiled alongside portmod and is required at runtime.

It will be built automatically if you use pip install -e ., or can be invoked manually using python setup.py build_rust --inplace. You may want to also use the --release option to build the optimized version.

If any rust code changes, the native extension will need to be rebuilt, and also note that if the optimized version is used, changes to localized .ftl files will not come into effect until the library is rebuilt, as they are compiled into the native library. When compiled in debug mode the .ftl files will be parsed at runtime instead, at a small performance penalty.

(Optional) Pre Commit

You can use pre-commit to run most of the checks that will later be done by CI before each commit is made (this includes everything but running inquisitor against the openmw-mods repository, and running the test suite).

All that needs to be done to set it up is run pre-commit install from within the portmod repository once you have pre-commit installed (via either your distribution’s package manager or pip).