home-assistant.io/source/developers/development_environment.markdown

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layout	title	description	date	sidebar	comments	sharing	footer
page	Set up Development Environment	Set up your environment to start developing for Home Assistant.	2014-12-21 13:32	true	false	true	true

You'll need to set up a development environment if you want to develop a new feature or component for Home Assistant. Read on to learn how to set up.

{% linkable_title Setup Local Repository %}

Visit the Home Assistant repository and click Fork. Once forked, setup your local copy of the source using the commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/YOUR_GIT_USERNAME/home-assistant.git
$ cd home-assistant
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.git

{% linkable_title Prepare Your Environment %}

{% linkable_title Core dependencies %}

Install the core dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev

{% linkable_title Platform dependencies %}

In order to run script/setup below you will need some more dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libjpeg-dev libffi-dev

Different distributions have different package installation mechanisms and sometimes packages names as well. For example Centos would use: `sudo yum install epel-release && sudo yum install python34 python34-devel mysql-devel`

Additional dependencies exist if you you plan to perform Frontend Development, please read the Frontend section to learn more.

{% linkable_title Setting up virtual environment (optional) %}

If you plan on providing isolation to your environment using venv. Within the home-assistant directory, create and activate your virtual environment.

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Note, Debian does not ship a full Python3 package and so requires you to install venv manually sudo apt-get install python3-venv.

{% linkable_title Setup and Run %}

• On Mac OS X and Linux:

$ cd home-assistant
$ script/setup

• On Windows, you can use python setup.py develop instead of the setup script.

• Run hass to invoke your local installation.

{% linkable_title Logging %}

By default logging in home-assistant is tuned for operating in production (set to INFO by default, with some modules set to even less verbose logging levels).

You can use the logger component to adjust logging to DEBUG to see even more details about what is going on.

{% linkable_title Developing on Windows %}

If you are using Windows as a development platform, make sure that you have the correct Microsoft Visual C++ build tools installed. Check the Windows Compilers section on the Python website for details. Validation using tox will fail if this is not done correctly.

Also, make sure to install or upgrade the setuptools Python package. It contains compatibility improvements and adds automatic use of compilers:

$ pip install --upgrade setuptools