Additional developer installation steps¶

These are some additional steps you should take if you plan to contribute to PsyNet’s source code.

Add your SSH key to GitLab¶

If you don’t yet have a GitLab user account, please create one via the GitLab website. You need to generate an SSH key (if you don’t have one already) and upload it to GitLab.

To generate an SSH key:

ssh-keygen -b 4096 -t rsa

Press Enter to save the key in the default location, and Enter again twice to create the key with no passphrase.

Copy the SSH key to the clipboard by running this command:

pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Then navigate to GitLab SSH keys, click ‘Add new key’, paste the key in the ‘Key’ box, remove the Expiration date if you think it’s helpful, then click ‘Add key’.

Install ChromeDriver¶

Needed for running the Selenium tests with headless Chrome.

Note

The version of ChromeDriver must match the version of Chrome you have currently installed.

On macOS run this line

brew install chromedriver

For Linux or Windows

Navigate to Chrome for Testing to find the download link for ChromeDriver corresponding to your Chrome installation. Copy the link and use it to download and then unzip the ChromeDriver executable, e.g. on Linux:
wget https://edgedl.me.gvt1.com/edgedl/chrome/chrome-for-testing/121.0.6167.85/linux64/chromedriver-linux64.zip --directory /tmp
sudo unzip /tmp/chromedriver-linux64.zip chromedriver -d /usr/local/bin/

Note

MacOS users only:

By default chromedriver will be blocked by the MacOS security policy. To unblock it, first try to run it:

chromedriver --version

If you see an error message stating that Apple cannot check chromedriver for malicious software, you can disable it by going to System Settings, Privacy & Security, then looking for a line that says ‘“Chromedriver was blocked from use because it is not from an identified developer”’. Click ‘Allow anyway’, then try rerunning Chromedriver.

Download Dallinger and PsyNet¶

Download Dallinger from GitHub:

cd
git clone https://github.com/Dallinger/Dallinger

If you haven’t already done so, download PsyNet from GitLab:

cd
git clone https://gitlab.com/PsyNetDev/PsyNet

Open PsyNet as a PyCharm project¶

If you are using PyCharm, you can open the PsyNet project by selecting ‘Open’ from the PyCharm welcome screen, then navigating to the psynet directory and selecting it. Follow the PyCharm prompts to create a virtual environment for PsyNet. When prompted to choose which requirements to install from, select demos/timeline/constraints.txt. This ensures that the right versions of all the PsyNet dependencies are installed (if you just ran pip install psynet you would get the latest, potentially incompatible versions of the dependencies).

Install PsyNet and Dallinger in editable mode¶

Within the virtual environment you just created, install PsyNet and Dallinger in editable mode:

pip3 install --editable '~/Dallinger[data]'
pip3 install --editable '~/PsyNet[dev]'

Editable mode means that any changes you make to the Dallinger/PsyNet source code will be automatically reflected in your virtual environment.

Note

If you are developing using Docker, you can use these editable versions of Dallinger and PsyNet by using the psynet-dev Docker command variants, for example:

bash docker/psynet-dev debug local

You can then check your installation by running

psynet --version

Note

When you are developing in PsyNet/Dallinger it’s important to keep track of which versions of the packages you need. Particular versions of PsyNet are tied to particular versions of Dallinger. To switch to a particular version of Dallinger or PsyNet, navigate to the relevant directory and run git checkout <tag> where <tag> is the version you want to use. For example:

cd ~/Dallinger
git checkout v9.0.0
cd ~/PsyNet
git checkout v10.1.0

Install the Git pre-commit hook¶

With the virtual environment still activated:

pip3 install pre-commit
pre-commit install

This will install the pre-commit hooks defined in .pre-commit-config.yaml to check for flake8 violations, sort and group import statements using isort, and enforce a standard Python source code format via black. You can run the black code formatter and flake8 checks manually at any time by running:

pre-commit run --all-files

You may also want to install a black plugin for your own code editor, though this is not strictly necessary, since the pre-commit hook will run black for you on commit.