NOTE: If anything on this page doesn't work for you, please file a bug!

(Related: Oil Native Quick Start / Where Contributors Have Problems / Oils Dev Cheat Sheet / Oil Dev Tips / Making Pull Requests / The Oils Repo Is Different From the Tarball Releases / AI Contribution Policy)

Requirements / Fiddly Bits

Please use Linux to make changes to Oils and test them

One reason for this is that the spec tests|Spec Tests run against four other shells (bash/dash/zsh/mksh), and we don't have a way of building the right versions of these shells on other OSes.

When I'm on a Mac, I use Ubuntu on Virtualbox to develop. Others have had success with OrbStack's Linux VMs. Note that OSH does work on OS X for end users, but development is a different story.

Please clone oils-for-unix/oils (rather than creating a fork)

Right now we have some awkwardness due to CI permissions.

We want you to send PRs from oils-for-unix/oils and not your own fork, so that Github Actions can get our $TOIL_KEY, and publish HTML results to http://op.oilshell.org/ .

But this is a hiccup for first time contributors. I have to add you to the Github project so the CI can run. Ping me on Zulip!

Build Two Complete Oils Interpreters: in Python and in C++ (5-10 minutes)

This is the standard dev setup, which involves building tools like re2c, Python 3, and MyPy.

Note that this process creates directories /wedge and ~/wedge. These are the only directories we touch outside the repository. To clean up the directories, you can simply run rm -rf /wedge ~/wedge or build/deps.sh rm-oils-crap. (We plan to get rid of /wedge, because it requires root access, but we haven't done it yet)

One-Time Setup of Custom Tools

This is for shells to test against, or custom Python-to-C++ translator, etc.

git clone https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils.git   # please use this repo, not your own fork
                                                      # this helps us use a Github Action secret on PRs

cd oils                   # enter the base directory

                          # Do ONE of these, depending on your distro
build/deps.sh wedge-deps-debian   # Works on Ubuntu too -- uses sudo apt-get
                                  # These are apt packages needed to build Python 2 and 3 from scratch ("wedges")
build/deps.sh wedge-deps-alpine   # We test this in our sourcehut CI, so it should work!
build/deps.sh wedge-deps-fedora   # Ditto, should work!

build/deps.sh fetch                # Download a bunch of source tarballs
                                   # If you're from China, maybe use:
                                   # PY_FTP_MIRROR=https://mirrors.huaweicloud.com build/deps.sh fetch

build/deps.sh install-wedges      # Build and install wedges in ../oils.DEPS

Every Time you git pull, or switch branches

. build/dev-shell.sh      # put our build of python2 in your $PATH

build/py.sh all           # Generates Python code - (re2c for lexer, CommonMark for help, etc.)

bin/osh -c 'echo hi'      # Sanity check to make sure it works.

bin/ysh -c '= 1 + 2'      # YSH sanity check

In case you get in trouble:

build/clean.sh              # deletes all the temp files in the repo
build/deps.sh rm-oils-crap  # deletes the build "wedges" outside the repo
                            # this is just rm -rf ~/wedge /wedge - latter requires root permissions

TODO: Clickable demo in gitpod or some other online dev env.

Quick Start with "minimal" build (~2 minutes)

This can be a quicker way to get started. It only works if you already have python2 on your machine (python2 being deprecated, of course).

One Time Setup

git clone https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils.git 

cd oils

build/py.sh wedge-deps-debian

Every Time you git pull, or switch branches

build/py.sh minimal       # MINIMAL dev build, including native/libc.c Python extension

. build/dev-shell.sh      # Put build tools in $PATH

bin/osh -c 'echo hi'

This is all you need to make many changes to Oils.

Quick Tests

test/unit.sh unit frontend/lexer_test.py     # Run an individual unit test
test/unit.sh all          # run most unit tests, takes about a second or two

test/spec.sh smoke        # run a single file; there are more but this is a good start
test/spec-py.sh ysh-all      # all YSH tests

See Spec Tests for details.

Cheat Sheet

See Oils Dev Cheat Sheet for a summary of the commands above.

And tips on running more tests and benchmarks.

Other Test Suites

There are many other test suites which are reported on:

  1. The /release/$VERSION/quality.html page on every release
  2. The "Soil" continuous build at http://travis-ci.oilshell.org/github-jobs/

For example, you can run

test/parse-errors.sh all

To see a big demonstration of parse errors. I use this to supplement the spec tests when changing the syntax of the language.

Working on C++: oils-cpp

If you did the above, then the Python bin/osh should be working.

If you want to work on C++, then you should get _bin/cxx-asan/osh to work. See Oil Native Quick Start, which links to the mycpp README.md.

Tips for Developing

Pull Requests / Code Review

See Making Pull Requests

I aim for 24-hour response time

Please feel free to ping andychu on Zulip or Github if you're waiting for a pull request review! (or to ask questions)

Usually I can respond in 24 hours. I might be traveling, in which case I'll respond with something like I hope to look at this by Tuesday.

I might have also missed your Github message, so it doesn't hurt to ping me.

Thank you for the contributions!

Code Style

Python code follows PEP 8, with some modifications from Google's Python style guide, like CapWords() for function names.

Code Overviews

Links