Dev instructions

Development environment based on the excellent Hypermodern Python series of blog posts, that includes unit testing and static typing, but modified to use conda instead of Poetry. Here, I describe some quick notes on how to start developing using this approach.

(I’ve made some more opinionated changes too. For example, I’ve opted not to use git precommit stuff because I find it makes me want to commit less often, which is not good when developing outside of the master branch.)

First, make sure conda is installed. Packages required to run the code are setup in environment.yml. These are installed using

conda env create -f environment.yml

To update dependencies (if a new version of the code requires new packages, for example), you can do

conda env update -f environment.yml

Then we have the development packages (such as linters) that we install with pip.

conda activate hello_world
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Frustratingly, we have to copy-paste the packages in environmment.yml to requirements.txt… otherwise nox doesn’t work. So keep that in mind, as you add packages. Maybe it’s fixable?

Running nox

To run the full set of unit tests, linters and typecheckers, use nox -rs. To run just the tests, do nox -rs tests. To format the code, run nox -rs black.

Creating a new project

To start a new project using this template,

• [ ] Verify everything works by running nox -rs in the root directory.
• [ ] rm -rfd .git to make a new repo.
• [ ] Choose your favorite python versions and update noxfile.py
• [ ] Put the required libraries in environment.yml and requirements.txt
• [ ] Put the required info in setup.py
• [ ] Change all instances of “hello_world” to the project name throughout.
• Start writing code! (and lots of tests!)