Developer Guide

Set Up Development Environment with Pixi

Pixi is a modern package manager that handles both Python and system dependencies automatically.

The routee-transit pyproject.toml file defines various development environments with Pixi for different Python versions (e.g. dev-py310, dev-py311, etc.) to ease development and testing. Follow the instructions below to configure your environment with Pixi.

1. Install pixi

Follow the installation instructions at pixi.sh or use:

# On macOS/Linux
curl -fsSL https://pixi.sh/install.sh | sh

2. Clone and set up the project

git clone https://github.com/NREL/routee-transit.git
cd routee-transit
pixi install

3. Activate the environment

pixi shell

To activate a specific environment (not just the default), use the -e flag:

pixi shell -e dev-py310

Alternatively, ou can use pixi run -e dev-py310 myfile.py to execute a python file in the environment specified. If you're using VS Code, the Pixi VSCode extension is useful.

Build Documentation

To build the documentation locally with jupyter-book, use the pixi task defined in pyproject.toml:

pixi run docs

Be aware that jupyter-book will run all of the documentation examples when the docs are built, which can take a few minutes. To build the documentation faster, you can skip the examples by simply commenting them out in the table of contents (docs/_toc.yml).