Setup the Python Build Environment

This document describes how to set up an environment for the development of the Glean Python bindings.

Instructions for installing a copy of the Glean Python bindings into your own environment for use in your project are described in adding Glean to your project.

Prerequisites

Glean requires Python 3.8 or later.

Make sure it is installed on your system and accessible on the PATH as python3.

Setting up Rust

If you've already set up Rust for building Glean for Android or iOS, you already have everything you need and can skip this section.

Rust can be installed using rustup, with the following commands:

• curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
• rustup update

Create a virtual environment

It is recommended to do all Python development inside a virtual environment to make sure there are no interactions with other Python libraries installed on your system.

You may want to manage your own virtual environment if, for example, you are developing a library that is using Glean and you want to install Glean into it. If you are just developing Glean itself, however, Glean's Makefile will handle the creation and use of a virtual environment automatically (though the Makefile unfortunately does not work on Microsoft Windows).

The instructions below all have both the manual instructions and the Makefile shortcuts.

Manual method

The following instructions use the basic virtual environment functionality that comes in the Python standard library. Other higher level tools exist to manage virtual environments, such as pipenv and conda. These will work just as well, but are not documented here. Using an alternative tool would replace the instructions in this section only, but all other instructions below would remain the same.

To create a virtual environment, enter the following command, replacing <venv> with the path to the virtual environment you want to create. You will need to do this only once.

$ python3 -m venv <venv>

Then activate the environment. You will need to do this for each new shell session when you want to develop Glean. The command to use depends on your shell environment.

Lastly, install Glean's Python development dependencies into the virtual environment.

pip install -r glean-core/python/requirements_dev.txt

Makefile method

$ make setup-python

The default location of the virtual environment used by the make file is .venvX.Y, where X.Y is the version of Python in use. This makes it possible to build and test for multiple versions of Python in the same checkout.

Note: If you wish to change the location of the virtual environment that the Makefile uses, pass the GLEAN_PYENV environment variable: make setup-python GLEAN_PYENV=mypyenv.

Build the Python bindings

Manual method

Building the Python bindings also builds the Rust shared object for the Glean SDK core.

$ maturin develop

Makefile method

This will implicitly setup the Python environment, rebuild the Rust core and then build the Python bindings.

$ make build-python

Running the Python unit tests

Manual method

Make sure the Python bindings are built, then:

$ py.test glean-core/python/tests

Makefile method

The following will run the Python unit tests using py.test:

$ make test-python

You can send extra parameters to the py.test command by setting the PYTEST_ARGS variable:

$ make test-python PYTEST_ARGS="-s --pdb"

Viewing logging output

Log messages (whether originating in Python or Rust) are emitted using the Python standard library's logging module. This module provides a lot of possibilities for customization, but the easiest way to control the log level globally is with logging.basicConfig:

import logging
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

Linting, formatting and type checking

The Glean Python bindings use the following tools:

• Linting/Formatting: ruff
• Type-checking: mypy

Manual method

$ cd glean-core/python
$ ruff check glean tests
$ ruff format glean tests
$ mypy glean

Makefile method

To just check the lints:

$ make lint-python

To reformat the Python files in-place:

$ make fmt-python

Building the Python API docs

The Python API docs are built using pdoc3.

Manual method

$ python -m pdoc --html glean --force -o build/docs/python

Makefile method

$ make python-docs

Building wheels for Linux

Building on Linux using the above instructions will create Linux binaries that dynamically link against the version of libc installed on your machine. This generally will not be portable to other Linux distributions, and PyPI will not even allow it to be uploaded. In order to create wheels that can be installed on the broadest range of Linux distributions, the Python Packaging Authority's manylinux project maintains a Docker image for building compatible Linux wheels.

The CircleCI configuration handles making these wheels from tagged releases. If you need to reproduce this locally, see the CircleCI job pypi-linux-release for an example of how this Docker image is used in practice.

Building wheels for Windows

The official wheels for Windows are produced on a Linux virtual machine using the Mingw toolchain.

The CircleCI configuration handles making these wheels from tagged releases. If you need to reproduce this locally, see the CircleCI job pypi-windows-release for an example of how this is done in practice.