# Installing iCalendar

To install the icalendar package, use:

    pip install icalendar

If installation is successful, you will be able to import the iCalendar package, like this:

    >>> import icalendar

## Development Setup

To start contributing changes to icalendar, you can clone the project to your file system using Git. You can fork the project first and clone your fork, too.

    git clone https://github.com/collective/icalendar.git
    cd icalendar

## Installing Python

You will need a version of Python installed to run the tests and execute the code. The latest version of Python 3 should work and will be enough to get you started. If you like to run the tests with different Python versions, the following setup process should work the same.

## Install Tox

First, install tox..

    pip install tox

From now on, tox will manage Python versions and test commands for you.

## Running Tests

`tox` manages all test environments in all Python versions.

To run all tests in all environments, simply run `tox`

    tox

You may not have all Python versions installed or you may want to run a specific one. Have a look at the documentation. This is how you can run `tox` with Python 3.9:

    tox -e py39

## Code Style

We strive towards a common code style. You can run the following command to auto-format the code.

    tox -e ruff

## Accessing a `tox` environment

If you like to enter a specific tox environment, you can do this:

    source .tox/py39/bin/activate

## Install `icalendar` Manually

The best way to test the package is to use `tox` as described above. If for some reason you cannot install `tox`, you can go ahead with the following section using your installed version of Python and `pip`.

If for example, you would like to use your local copy of icalendar in another Python environment, this section explains how to do it.

You can install the local copy of `icalendar` with `pip` like this:

    cd icalendar
    python -m pip install -e .

This installs the module and dependencies in your Python environment so that you can access local changes. If tox fails to install `icalendar` during its first run, you can activate the environment in the `.tox` folder and manually setup `icalendar` like this.

Try it out:

    Python 3.12.0 (main, Mar  1 2024, 09:09:21) [GCC 13.2.0] on linux
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> import icalendar
    >>> icalendar.Calendar()
    VCALENDAR({})

## Build the documentation

To build the documentation, follow these steps:

    source .tox/py311/bin/activate
    pip install -r requirements_docs.txt
    cd docs
    make html

You can now open the output from `_build/html/index.html`.

To build the documentation, view it in a web browser, and automatically reload changes while you edit documentation, use the following command.

    make livehtml

Then open a web browser at http://127.0.0.1:8050.

To build the presentation-version use the following command.

    make presentation

You can open the presentation at `presentation/index.html`.

You can also use `tox` to build the documentation:

    cd icalendar
    tox -e docs