# For Developers

If you would like to contribute to virtualenvwrapper directly, these instructions should help you get started. Patches, bug reports, and feature requests are all welcome through the BitBucket site. Contributions in the form of patches or pull requests are easier to integrate and will receive priority attention.

Note

Before contributing new features to virtualenvwrapper core, please consider whether they should be implemented as an extension instead.

## Building Documentation

The documentation for virtualenvwrapper is written in reStructuredText and converted to HTML using Sphinx. The build itself is driven by make. You will need the following packages in order to build the docs:

- Sphinx

- docutils

- sphinxcontrib-bitbucket

Once all of the tools are installed into a virtualenv using pip, run `make html` to generate the HTML version of the documentation:

    $ make html
    rm -rf virtualenvwrapper/docs
    (cd docs && make html SPHINXOPTS="-c sphinx/pkg")
    sphinx-build -b html -d build/doctrees  -c sphinx/pkg source build/html
    Running Sphinx v0.6.4
    loading pickled environment... done
    building [html]: targets for 2 source files that are out of date
    updating environment: 0 added, 2 changed, 0 removed
    reading sources... [ 50%] command_ref
    reading sources... [100%] developers

    looking for now-outdated files... none found
    pickling environment... done
    checking consistency... done
    preparing documents... done
    writing output... [ 33%] command_ref
    writing output... [ 66%] developers
    writing output... [100%] index

    writing additional files... search
    copying static files... WARNING: static directory '/Users/dhellmann/Devel/virtualenvwrapper/plugins/docs/sphinx/pkg/static' does not exist
    done
    dumping search index... done
    dumping object inventory... done
    build succeeded, 1 warning.

    Build finished. The HTML pages are in build/html.
    cp -r docs/build/html virtualenvwrapper/docs

The output version of the documentation ends up in `./virtualenvwrapper/docs` inside your sandbox.

## Running Tests

The test suite for virtualenvwrapper uses shunit2 and tox. The shunit2 source is included in the `tests` directory, but tox must be installed separately (`pip install tox`).

To run the tests under bash, zsh, and ksh for Python 2.7 through 3.6, run `tox` from the top level directory of the hg repository.

To run individual test scripts, use a command like:

    $ tox tests/test_cd.sh

To run tests under a single version of Python, specify the appropriate environment when running tox:

    $ tox -e py27

Combine the two modes to run specific tests with a single version of Python:

    $ tox -e py27 tests/test_cd.sh

Add new tests by modifying an existing file or creating new script in the `tests` directory.

## Creating a New Template

virtualenvwrapper.project templates work like virtualenvwrapper plugins. The entry point group name is `virtualenvwrapper.project.template`. Configure your entry point to refer to a function that will run (source hooks are not supported for templates).

The argument to the template function is the name of the project being created. The current working directory is the directory created to hold the project files (`$PROJECT_HOME/$envname`).

### Help Text

One difference between project templates and other virtualenvwrapper extensions is that only the templates specified by the user are run. The `mkproject` command has a help option to give the user a list of the available templates. The names are taken from the registered entry point names, and the descriptions are taken from the docstrings for the template functions.