Development Guide¶
Prerequisites¶
Dev Tools¶
We recommend VSCode for development. If nothing else, it has heaps of high quality extensions and atopile language support, plus it's what we all use internally - so we know how to configure it for purpose.
You should have at minimum: - VSCode - VSCode atopile extension - Python Extension for VSCode
Verbosity¶
You can increase the verbosity of atopile by using the -v of -vv flags, eg. ato -vv build
Flag Location
Flags are placed after the ato command and before the command you want to run. For example, ato -vv build will run the build command with the verbose flag set to the highest level, while ato build -vv will not work.
Debugging¶
You can start the CLI in debug mode by using the --debug flag, eg. ato --debug build
This will run a debugpy server on port 5678 which you can connect to with the VSCode built-in debugger.
Syntax highlighting isn't working
If you're having trouble with syntax highlighting in the debugger, it might be because VSCode sets up a mapping between the remote and local file paths by default - remove it.
Viewer development¶
Building the viewer¶
You first need to build the viewer when installing atopile from it's repository directly. First, navigate to the viewer directly:
Then install the node dependencies:
Finally, build the viewer:
This will create a dist directory within the viewer directory. Invoking the ato view command will point the server to it.
Dev viewer server¶
When working on the viewer, it is quite handy to use the following command to start a dev server:
As you save your work, vite will automatically rebuild your project and advertise it on a local address. Navigate to the address to inspect your work. We recommend running the ato view command from one of your existing projects, so you have a project to look at during development.