Get started as a contributor¶

Prerequisites¶

Flower uses pyproject.toml to manage dependencies and configure development tools (the ones which support it). Poetry is a build tool which supports PEP 517.

Developer Machine Setup¶

Preliminaries¶

Some system-wide dependencies are needed.

For macOS¶

  • Install homebrew. Don’t forget the post-installation actions to add brew to your PATH.

  • Install xz (to install different Python versions) and pandoc to build the docs:

    $ brew install xz pandoc

For Ubuntu¶

Ensure you system (Ubuntu 22.04+) is up-to-date, and you have all necessary packages:

$ apt update
$ apt install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev \
              libreadline-dev libbz2-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev pandoc

Create Flower Dev Environment¶

  1. Clone the Flower repository from GitHub:

    $ git clone git@github.com:adap/flower.git
$ cd flower

  2. Create and activate a Python virtual environment for development. See Set up a virtual env for detailed instructions.

    One way to do this is by using pyenv and pyenv-virtualenv. You can also optionally install a specific Python version using pyenv if you haven’t already installed your desired version:

    $ pyenv install <your-python-version>
$ pyenv virtualenv <your-python-version> <your-env-name>
$ pyenv activate <your-env-name>

  3. Install Poetry, which is used to manage dependencies and development workflows:

    (your-env-name) $ pip install poetry==1.7.1

  4. Navigate to the framework directory and install the Flower project in development mode, including all optional dependencies:

    (your-env-name) $ cd framework
(your-env-name) $ python -m poetry install --all-extras

Convenience Scripts¶

The Flower repository contains a number of convenience scripts to make recurring development tasks easier and less error-prone. See the /dev subdirectory for a full list. The following scripts are amongst the most important ones:

Compile ProtoBuf Definitions¶

$ python -m flwr_tool.protoc

Auto-Format Code¶

$ ./framework/dev/format.sh

Run Linters and Tests¶

$ ./framework/dev/test.sh

Add a pre-commit hook¶

Developers may integrate a pre-commit hook into their workflow utilizing the pre-commit library. The pre-commit hook is configured to execute two primary operations: ./framework/dev/format.sh and ./framework/dev/test.sh scripts.

There are multiple ways developers can use this:

  1. Install the pre-commit hook to your local git directory by simply running:

    $ pre-commit install

    • Each git commit will trigger the execution of formatting and linting/test scripts.

    • If in a hurry, bypass the hook using --no-verify with the git commit command.

      $ git commit --no-verify -m "Add new feature"

  2. For developers who prefer not to install the hook permanently, it is possible to execute a one-time check prior to committing changes by using the following command:

    $ pre-commit run --all-files

    This executes the formatting and linting checks/tests on all the files without modifying the default behavior of git commit.

Run Github Actions (CI) locally¶

Developers could run the full set of Github Actions workflows under their local environment by using Act. Please refer to the installation instructions under the linked repository and run the next command under Flower main cloned repository folder:

$ act

The Flower default workflow would run by setting up the required Docker machines underneath.

Build Release¶

Flower uses Poetry to build releases. The necessary command is wrapped in a simple script:

$ ./framework/dev/build.sh

The resulting .whl and .tar.gz releases will be stored in the ./framework/dist subdirectory.

Build Documentation¶

Flower’s documentation uses Sphinx. To build the documentation locally, run the following script:

$ ./framework/dev/build-docs.sh

This will generate HTML documentation in ./framework/doc/build/html.

Note that, in order to build the documentation locally, Pandoc needs to be installed on the system.