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Getting Started as a Developer

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Dominic Oram edited this page Sep 1, 2023 · 4 revisions

These notes are aimed at anyone who wants to get more involved in Artemis development, likely DLS staff. As such it is mostly aimed at people that are not necessarily familiar with GitHub workflows and Python 3 development.

Development Environment

This codebase is public so you are free to clone it without any privileges. However, if you wish to make edits you must first have a GitHub account, which you should set up with ssh.

To get started with developing Artemis, do the following:

  • Clone this repo git clone git@github.com:DiamondLightSource/python-artemis.git
  • Use the instructions in the README to get a dev environment set up
  • You can now use your chosen IDE to develop with, however vscode is the recommended IDE. This can be used at DLS by running:
cd /where/this/project/is
module load vscode
code ./.vscode/python-artemis.code-workspace
  • You should then be able to run the unit tests in vscode by going to the testing panel and pressing the run all button in the top right (note the system tests will not necessarily pass at this point but all unit tests should): image
  • Note that because Artemis makes heavy use of Dodal the workspace specified above contains both repos. On first running vscode you may need to change the interpretter that dodal is using to be the same as the Artemis one (.venv/bin/python), see here on how to do this.

There are then two ways of making edits to the code:

  • For people making the occasional edits you can make a fork and submit a PR through that
  • For people working regularly on the codebase get in touch through Slack with your GH username and you can be added to the contributors list

When writing code, particularly as a regular developer, you should follow the documented workflow. This workflow is mostly based of the GH Workflow and is a little different from the gerrit flow.

Beamline Deployment

See here for instructions on deploying a new version of Artemis. It can then be run by running the run_artemis.sh script from the beamline control machine as gda2. Alternatively, if the beamline is already running Artemis you can just call artemis_restart() from the GDA Jython console. For GDA to talk to Artemis it needs to be switched to this change and a server restart. Subsequently any Xraycentring gridscans run by GDA will use Artemis. Details on where the logs are and other info for debugging Artemis as a reasonably well informed user can be found here.

Background on Bluesky

The written Bluesky tutorial or the interactive one are good places to start on on how to use Bluesky, which Artemis uses for the actual logic of how to do a scan. The other infrastructure that Artemis uses is:

  • Flask for communication between GDA<->Artemis
  • dataclasses_json is used to convert parameters passed to Artemis into Python dataclasses
  • Artemis attaches callbacks to the Bluesky plan to perform communications with outside services:
    • nexgen for writing NeXus files
    • ispyb for registering collections into the database
    • zocalo for triggering analysis and receiving results

Artemis uses many of the modern features of Python 3. In particular you should take some time to review:

  • Generators - all Bluesky plans are generators
  • Decorators - there are a number of helper decorators in Bluesky, in general Artemis tends not to use them to increase readability but they could be used

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