If you’d like to contribute (or maybe just run the very latest and greatest version of our API), this section details what you need to do to get your computer and local repository set up.

Individual projects may have additional instructions, so be sure to check out the various project READMEs, too.

Environment and Repository

Your computer will need the following tools installed to be able to develop with the Opentrons platform:

• macOS 10.11+, Linux, or Windows 10

  • On Windows, please configure Git’s core.autocrlf setting (see the Git config docs) to input so that shell scripts required for the robot’s boot process in api/opentrons/resources do not have carriage returns inserted
    
    

• Python 3.6 (pyenv is optional, but recommended for macOS / Linux. If pyenv is not available for your system or you do not want to use it, you can set the environment variable OT_PYTHON to the full path to the Python 3.6 executable)

  pyenv install 3.6.4
  

• Node v8 LTS (Carbon) - nvm is optional, but recommended

  nvm install lts/carbon
  

• yarn - JavaScript package manager

• commitizen - Commit message formatter

  yarn global add commitizen
  

• GNU Make - we use Makefiles to manage our builds

• cURL - used to push development updates to robots

Once you’re set up, clone the repository and install all project dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/Opentrons/opentrons.git
cd opentrons
make install

In addition, if (and only if) you want to build a PDF version of the Opentrons API documentation, you must install a latex distribution that includes a callable pdflatex. If that is installed, you can do make -C api docs-pdf.