CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Virtual environment

It is recommended to set up a python virtual environment to keep installed dependencies isolated from your system dependencies.

You can do this by running the following:

# Install virtualenv globally
pip install virtualenv

# Create local virtual environment (will create directory named "venv" in your working directory)
python3 -m venv venv

# Activate the virtual environment in your current terminal/shell
source venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Note

Klipper aims to be dependency free. We are ONLY using dependencies here for the development environment. We should not use any of these dependencies in any of the code that we intend to run in klipper.

Klipper sources

This is not strictly required, but it can be helpful for your IDE (specifically tested with VSCode) to include the klipper sources in your PYTHONPATH. To do this, at this time you'll need to manually clone klipper into this project like this:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/Klipper3d/klipper

Then you'll need to ensure the klipper/klippy is added in the PYTHONPATH environment variable. The project .vscode/settings.json should configure that for VSCode, but you may need to refer to your own IDE for help ensuring the extra path is added.

Linting

ruff check

Tip

Some lint errors may be automatically fixable. Run ruff check --fix to fix them.

Updating requirements.txt

If you need to add additional development tools (e.g. pip install <some-dependency>) that are to be used by CI/CD workflows, ensure they are added to the requirements.txt by running the following:

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Warning

Ensure this is only done from a virtual environment, otherwise it will add all of your globally installed dependencies.