Development

This section describes how to get started with your own development.

Your Own Git Repo

You will want to begin with setting up your own Git repo. If you are unfamiliar with Git, then you should read up on it, and/or do some tutorials. It is beyond the scope of this documentation to teach Git.

There are some 3rd party Git GUI tools that you could use to help, especially if you don’t like the command line interface of Git. Consider these,

https://www.gitkraken.com/git-client (not free, works everywhere)

https://www.sourcetreeapp.com (free, Windows/Max only)

https://git-scm.com/download/gui/linux (list of others)

To get started, create yourself a guthub account.

There are two ways to being using Sistemi Lente/Prism with Git,

The first way, is to fork the scripts repo to your own github repo. This is the easiest way to get started, but it has the draw back that all git forks must be public, and its very unlikely that you want that. So the forking method will not be used below.

The second way is to clone scripts and push it to your own repo. Detailed instructions are shown below

  • Create a new repository at github.com. (this is your repository)

    • Give it the same name as Sistemi repository, scripts

    • Don’t initialize it with a README, .gitignore, or license.

  • Clone the scripts repository repository to your local machine. (if you haven’t done so already)

git clone https://github.com/sistemicorp/scripts.git

  • Note that the scripts clone will be created under your current directory. Some prefer all their (git) repositories to be under a common directory, so you might actually do something like this,

mkdir ~/git
cd ~/git
git clone https://github.com/sistemicorp/scripts.git
cd scripts
sudo pip3 install -f requirements.txt

  • Pip install will install all the Python modules needed to run Prism

    • NOTE: Do not use/install any other Python modules.

    • If another module is needed, contact Sistemi to have it added to Prism.

  • Rename the local repository’s current ‘origin’ to ‘upstream’

git remote rename origin upstream

  • Give the local repository an ‘origin’ that points to your repository

git remote add origin https://github.com/your-account/scripts.git

  • Push the local repository to your repository on github

git push origin master

  • Now ‘origin’ points to your repository & ‘upstream’ points to the other repository

  • Create a new branch for your changes with

git checkout -b my-feature-branch

  • You can git commit as usual to your repository

  • To pull changes from Sistemi scripts to your master branch use,

git pull upstream master

  • You want to be able to pull from Sistemi scripts occasionally to get Sistemi updates to scripts, and/or examples, drivers, etc.

Repo Setup

Additional steps.

Install Git Hooks

Git Hooks are generally replaced by Git Actions and are beyond the scope of these instructions

In the scripts repo, there is a folder called hooks. The contents of this folder needs to be copied to ./.git/hooks folder of your repository.

Depending on your directory structure, this example command may work,

cd ~/git/scripts
cp hooks/* ./git/hooks

Create a Tag

The Sistemi system reports the version of things to help keep you organized, including the version of your scripts.

On whatever branch you decide to “release” your scripts, for example, the “master” branch, create a tag on that branch. The tag MUST be of this format,

Name-V.v

where:
    Name - is anything you want, keep it short, say <8 characters
    V - is major revision, manually increased by YOU, be making a new Tag
    v - is minor revision, manually increased by YOU, be making a new Tag

Example commands to create (and push) a tag,

git checkout master
git tag MyTest-1.0
git push origin --tags

There should only be one tag in effect at a time, and `scripts` has a tag already, remove that tag,

git checkout master
git tag --delete Scripts-0.1
git push origin --tags

There should only be one tag in effect at a time, so remove a previous tag. Here is the sequence to change the minor version,

git checkout master
git tag --delete MyTest-1.0
git tag MyTest-1.1
git push origin --tags

Change README.md

Change this file to suit your needs. For example, document your script/program naming strategy.

Command Line Development

Initial development will be done in “headless” mode, whereupon coding is done outside of the GUI used in production.

A command line version of the core engine of the system is at the top of the scripts folder, called prism_dev.py. The command line help,

computer:~/git/scripts$ python3 prism_dev.py --help
usage: prism_dev.py [-h] --script SCRIPT

prism_dev

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --script SCRIPT  Path to script file to run

Usage examples:
    python3 prism_dev.py --script ./public/prism/scripts/example/prod_v0/prod_0.scr

Notes about the command line development environment,

  • parallel, multi-threaded, multiple test jigs are not supported

    • script is run as a single thread - cannot test parallelism

  • Results are NOT sent to the Lente Server, however a local Result file with the results will be created for inspection purposes.

  • script substitutions are not supported, leaving two options for developers,

    • rename script subs section to something else and populate the subs manually, save this script to a new name while developing. Revert after everything is working.

    • use helper script prism_subs.py, which will perform the substitutions. This helper needs to be modified per script it is used on.

After your script is running in the command line mode, you can try it in the Prism GUI.