Development Mode for mtools

This page provides the required steps to switch your mtools installation into "development" mode. This will let you test the develop branch, beta and release candidate versions as well as your own feature implementations and bugfixes, while still providing an easy fallback to the stable master branch.

Steps to move from a pip installation to "develop" mode

1. Get rid of your pip installation of mtools

    sudo pip uninstall mtools
   

2. Clone the current mtools github repo to your computer. This step will create a folder mtools under your current folder, so you may want to switch to an appropriate directory first (e.g. ~/code/)

    git clone https://github.com/rueckstiess/mtools.git
   

   If you have forked mtools to your own account, just replace rueckstiess with your own github username.

3. Change into that mtools folder and check out the desired unstable branch (in this example develop)

    cd mtools
    git checkout develop
   

4. Install scripts in "development" mode using either of:

• pip (recommended as a convenience for installing additional dependencies)

    sudo pip install -e'/path/to/cloned/repo[all]'

• setup.py

    sudo python setup.py develop

5. Test if it worked by checking if the scripts can be found from any folder via tab-completion

    mlogf<tab>
   

   This should auto-complete to mlogfilter. Also confirm the current version:

    mlogfilter --version
   

Switching between stable and release candidate branch

You can always switch back to the current stable version, which is under the master branch. Change into the mtools directory and run

git checkout master

to switch to the stable master branch, and change back to the unstable branch with

git checkout develop

You can always confirm your current version with the --version parameter on any of the tools.

mloginfo --version

Note: Instead of develop you can also check out any other branches, like release candidates.