Setup VOLTTRON core for development

Prerequisites

  • A Linux environment(machine/VM/docker container/WSL2 environment) VOLTTRON is tested on Ubuntu 22.04 but other Linux environments should work.

  • Fork of volttron-core repository. See forking volttron-core for development

Install VOLTTRON requirements

  • git >= 2.25

  • poetry >= 1.2.2

  • python >= 3.10

Optional but handy is installing the tree command.

The below commands assume you have the required version of python already installed.

$> sudo apt install git

# As of this writting the 1.2 version of poetry is in beta and is in the  master branch of poetry.
$> curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 - --preview

# Add poetry path to PATH variable. Also add this to your ~/.bashrc file
export PATH="/home/volttron/.local/bin:$PATH"

# Configure poetry to use project root virtual environments
$> poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true

# Check the configuration
$> poetry config --list

Environment Setup

For the rest of the document we assume /repos/volttron-core is the root of the git cloned repository and is designated as the VOLTTRON_ROOT.

Clone the forked volttron-core

cd /repos
git clone https://github.com/<your namespace>/volttron-core --branch develop
cd volttron-core

Install VOLTTRON

cd /repos/volttron-core
poetry install

Activated shell

# creates a new shell and activate the environment
poetry shell

After executing the above commands your environment is setup for starting volttron. The next step is to begin developing an agent(see agent development, or continue on with setting up pycharm for use with this environment(see Pycharm development environment)

Note: To exit the poetry shell use the exit command. this deactivates the environment and exits the spawned shell.