Setting Up and Using the Development Environment#

Last revised on 2026 MAY 28 by Z. Ellis.

Note

The following covers setting up a development environment for Scarabaeus. If you are simply using Scarabaeus, see the User Guide.

Developers on the Scarabaeus team use a few more tools in addition to those included in the distributed package to support running tests, generating documentation, writing tutorials, and compiling source code. This document will guide a developer through setting up the development environment necessary for these tasks.

Prerequisites#

Most of the development team uses VSCode as their IDE because of its extension ecosystem. Below are the recommended extensions for development:

  • Python: provides language support for Python

  • Rust Analyzer: provides language support for Rust

  • GitLens: most of the development team uses GitLens for managing version control

  • Jupyter: SCB utilizes Jupyter Notebooks for all tutorials

Clone the Repository#

Clone the Scarabaeus repository.

Set Up A Virtual Environment#

Before installing the developer environment, we’ll need to create a virtual environment to place hold it. In your terminal, run:

python3 -m venv .venv

And activate it with:

source .venv/bin/activate

You’ll know it’s activated when you see (.venv) in your terminal. To deactivate, run:

deactivate

Install the Development Environment#

With the virtual environment activated, run the following command to install the development environment:

pip install -e . --group dev

Note

Sometimes pip might not recognize the --group command. This is usually fixed by updating with python -m pip install --upgrade pip

This will install more dependencies than the standard installation, which include:

  • maturin: build Rust code and bind it to Python

  • pre-commit: manage Scarabaeus Git hooks

  • nbstripout: remove cell results from Jupyter Notebooks when pushing to Git

  • numpydoc: formatting for documentation generation

  • pytest: testing suite architecture

The following sections require the packages installed with the dev environment to function.

Build From Source#

See Building From Source.

Enable Git Commit Hooks#

The first time you clone the repository or create/pull a new branch, in the terminal run:

pre-commit install

This will add Scarabaeus’ development hooks to your Git configuration, acting as an extra layer of quality assurance when you push a commit. If the pre-commit command is not found, ensure that you’ve installed the [Scarabaeus dev environment](#set-up-scarabaeus-dev-environment).

The hooks we use are:

  • nbstripout: Jupyter Notebooks are a powerful tool for writing tutorials, but they also produce metadata in their cells when run that we don’t want to track on git. We use nbstripout to automate this removal.

  • reuse: We use reuse to ensure that all files committed to the repository are SPDX compliant.