Developer Guide

Welcome to the L’ART Research Assistant Developer Guide. This is our “essential reading” for anyone who wants to contribute, enhance, integrate or otherwise modify the Research Assistant. It will cover everything from contribution guidelines and setting up the development environment to understanding how the code is organised and how to build the app and the documentation from source.

You may also want to have a look at the API Documentation, which covers both the Python APIs for the backend and the JavaScript APIs for the frontend.

Contents

• 1. Contributing
  • 1.1. What do I need to know to help?
  • 1.2. How do I make a contribution?
  • 1.3. Where can I go for help?
  • 1.4. Code of Conduct
• 2. Setting up the development environment
  • 2.1. Installing the pre-requirements
  • 2.2. Get a copy of the source code
  • 2.3. Set up pipenv and install dependencies
  • 2.4. Running the app from the source
  • 2.5. Bonus: Consider using a specialised source code editor
• 3. The manage.py utility
• 4. Building from source
  • 4.1. Additional build dependencies
  • 4.2. Building the app and the installer
  • 4.3. Building the documentation
  • 4.4. Cleaning up after yourself
  • 4.5. Known issues with building
• 5. Roadmap