Setup Environment (Windows/Linux)

Learn how setup a WSL development environment, install all required packages and libraries, set up an SSH key and install Vs Code.

WSL: For Windows Only

Installing WSL

Development will be primarily done in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) as it standardizes the libraries and packages needed.

If you have not installed it already, please run the following command in your terminal:

wsl.exe --install --d Ubuntu-22.04

For more information, please refer to this guide

Running WSL

If you are running a terminal, the easiest way to launch WSL is to click the Dropdown Banner in the top left and then select your WSL distribution.

Note: You can have multiple WSL distributions at once, but make sure to use the same one every time.

Once you are running your WSL terminal, the steps will be the same as if you were on native linux.

Setting Up Packages

Apt Packages

In any Linux distribution , the first thing to do is to fetch all the new package updates

Run this command to fetch all updates:

sudo apt update

Once you have fetched all updates, its time to download all the packages needed.

Run this command to download and install them (The -y means to automatically say yes):

sudo apt install -y make build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev \
libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev \
xz-utils tk-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev libhdf5-dev tesseract-ocr git-lfs

PyEnv

Once all your apt dependencies are installed, its time to set up the python environment.

We will be using a virtual environment manager called PyEnv.

To install please run:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pyenv/pyenv-installer/master/bin/pyenv-installer | bash
git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv-virtualenv.git $(pyenv root)/plugins/pyenv-virtualenv

This will automatically fetch and install PyEnv on your machine. To finish the setup run:

cat <<'EOF' >> $HOME/.bashrc
if [[ -x $(command -v pyenv) ]]; then
    eval "$(pyenv init --path)"
    eval "$(pyenv init -)"
    eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"
fi
EOF

Now, PyEnv is ready, and its time to create the python environment.

Python Environment and Libraries

First you need to clone the project repo using this command:

(Please make sure you are in the directory you want to clone into before running the command)

git clone [e-mail]:Team488/Alt.git

If you have used git clone before, you might notice that the url is not a typical web url. This will be explained below.

Now change into the Alt directory:

cd Alt

And finally, run the setup script to create the python environment.

./setup.sh

This command will take some time as it downloads everything needed for the python environment

Git LFS

Since we have some large AI models, and other files that are too large for GitHub to handle normally we use Git LFS (Large File Storage) to keep track of them.

At this point the git-lfs apt package should already be installed so we only need to run a couple simple commands to download the large files

git lfs install
git lfs fetch
git lfs pull

Final Steps

SSH Keys

Before you can get started coding, you need to create a ssh key to push your changes to GitHub.

This is because the repository we use is private and limited to team members only

(Note: this means you must be added to the Vision GitHub team by one of the mentors)

(This is also why we cloned the repository with the ssh url instead of https url)

To generate a key run the following:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[e-mail]"

Unless you know what you are doing, the best choice will be to go with the default options when generating a key.

Now that your key has been created, you need to add the public key to your GitHub.

The public key location will be displayed as follows, you can run cat to display the file and get the key

The key fingerprint and ssh keygen output

cat /home/yourpath/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Now add it to your GitHub by going to your account -> settings -> SSH and GPG keys.

Add the key and give it a name, then it's ready.

Adding SSH key in GitHub

Vs Code

The very final step is to install our code editor of choice, Vs Code.

Run this command, and it will be installed:

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | gpg --dearmor > microsoft.gpg
sudo install -o root -g root -m 644 microsoft.gpg /etc/apt/keyrings/microsoft-archive-keyring.gpg
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64,armhf signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/microsoft-archive-keyring.gpg] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vscode.list'

Now, you can open a Vs Code instance in the current directory by running:

code .