Developer Info

From IPython

Welcome to IPython's Developer Zone. This page has information about IPython's development. IPython is developed by a distributed team of developers using tools like Git and GitHub.

For more information, please look at our Developer docs.

[edit] Git Repositories

IPython development has been moved to GitHub, using the Git distributed version control system.

The development version of IPython can be downloaded from our GitHub repository by doing:

git clone git://github.com/ipython/ipython.git

[edit] Running from a Git checkout without reinstalling after every update

The best way to run IPython from Git development code is to install setuptools and run

setupegg.py develop

in your git checkout directory. This way, the development version will be available as your "system" IPython, and this will also work for projects that embed IPython.

Another way is to add a couple of symlinks; however, this won't support embedding IPython. As an example, let's assume that your $PYTHONPATH includes the directory $HOME/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages (a convenient choice if you usually install locally downloaded pacakges via setup.py install --prefix=$HOME/usr/local). Lets imagine you've also just done the checkout of the IPython trunk, as indicated above, and put it in $HOME/usr/local/src. Then, the IPython library directory would be $HOME/usr/local/src/ipython/IPython. To make this available to python, add the following symlink:

ln -s $HOME/usr/local/src/ipython/IPython $HOME/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/IPython

You will also need to symlink several IPython startup scripts so that they can be found by your $PATH. In the above example, you might do:

ln -s $HOME/usr/local/src/ipython/scripts/ipython /usr/local/bin/ipython

ln -s $HOME/usr/local/src/ipython/scripts/pycolor /usr/local/bin/pycolor

Note that even if the code were to contain C extensions (IPython currently doesn't), you don't need to issue a python setup.py command. Rather, you'd just manually rebuild the extensions via:

python setup.py build_ext --inplace

The inplace option ensures that the extension module is left in the library directory, so the above symlink trick finds all the code (pure python and extensions) together.

[edit] Contributing to IPython

The developer guide in the official documentation provides basic information on how to contribute to IPython as a developer.

You can also find out how to write The perfect pull request.

[edit] Bug Reports and Feature Requests

We want IPython to be as bug-free as possible, so we encourage our users to report all bugs they find, as well as important feature requests. If you don't have a Github account yet, you can create one for free.

From 2008 until 2010 we used Launchpad for bug tracking; all of the active bugs we had on Launchpad have been ported with their entire comment history over to GitHub.

[edit] Developer Mailing List

We have a mailing list for discussions about the development of IPython. There is also a web-based gmane mirror of this list.

[edit] External Dependencies

We are fully committed to having the core of IPython depend on nothing outside of the Python standard library. This point is non-negotiable, because:

• IPython needs to run on Jython and IronPython
• IPython ships on the OLPC. Space is a huge concern on this platform.