Getting Started

We’re pleased that you are interested in working on pip.

This document is meant to get you setup to work on pip and to act as a guide and reference to the the development setup. If you face any issues during this process, please open an issue about it on the issue tracker.

Development tools

pip uses tox for testing against multiple different Python environments and ensuring reproducible environments for linting and building documentation.

For developing pip, you need to install tox on your system. Often, you can just do python -m pip install tox to install and use it.

Running Tests

pip uses the pytest test framework, mock and pretend for testing. These are automatically installed by tox for running the tests.

To run tests locally, run:

$ tox -e py36

The example above runs tests against Python 3.6. You can also use other versions like py27 and pypy3.

tox has been configured to any additional arguments it is given to pytest. This enables the use of pytest’s rich CLI. As an example, you can select tests using the various ways that pytest provides:

$ # Using file name
$ tox -e py36 -- tests/functional/test_install.py
$ # Using markers
$ tox -e py36 -- -m unit
$ # Using keywords
$ tox -e py36 -- -k "install and not wheel"

Running pip’s test suite requires supported version control tools (subversion, bazaar, git, and mercurial) to be installed. If you are missing one of the VCS tools, you can tell pip to skip those tests:

$ tox -e py36 -- -k "not svn"
$ tox -e py36 -- -k "not (svn or git)"

Running Linters

pip uses flake8 and isort for linting the codebase. These ensure that the codebase is in compliance with PEP 8 and the imports are consistently ordered and styled.

To use linters locally, run:

$ tox -e lint-py2
$ tox -e lint-py3

The above commands run the linters on Python 2 followed by Python 3.

Note

Do not silence errors from flake8 with # noqa comments or otherwise. The only exception to this is silencing unused-import errors for imports related to static type checking as currently flake8 does not understand PEP 484 type-comments.

Running mypy

pip uses mypy to run static type analysis, which helps catch certain kinds of bugs. The codebase uses PEP 484 type-comments due to compatibility requirements with Python 2.7.

To run the mypy type checker, run:

$ tox -e mypy

Building Documentation

pip’s documentation is built using Sphinx. The documentation is written in reStructuredText.

To build it locally, run:

$ tox -e docs

The built documentation can be found in the docs/build folder.