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 Environment

pip is a command line application written in Python. For developing pip, you should install Python on your computer.

For developing pip, you need to install tox. Often, you can run python -m pip install tox to install and use it.

Running pip From Source Tree

To run the pip executable from your source tree during development, run pip from the src directory:

$ python src/pip --version

Running Tests

pip’s tests are written using the pytest test framework, mock and pretend. tox is used to automate the setup and execution of pip’s 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 forward 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 pre-commit for managing linting of the codebase. pre-commit performs various checks on all files in pip and uses tools that help follow a consistent code style within the codebase.

To use linters locally, run:

$ tox -e lint

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.