Developing with Ephys Link

Ephys Link is free and open-source software. All of our code is available on GitHub, and we welcome contributions from the community!

This section describes:

• The Socket.IO server's API and how to communicate with Ephys Link from a client application
• How to add a new manipulator to Ephys Link
• General code organization for Ephys Link
• Auto-generated source code reference intended for developers who are maintaining Ephys Link

Installing for Development

1. Clone the repository.
2. Install UV
3. Install Hatch
4. In a terminal, navigate to the repository's root directory and run

hatch shell

This will create a virtual environment, install the latest Python for this project (if not found), and install the package in editable mode.

If you encounter any dependency issues (particularly with aiohttp), try installing the latest Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC v143+ x86/64) and the Windows SDK (10/11) via Visual Studio Build Tools Installer.

Contributing Code

We recommend first time contributors to read this guide by GitHub to understand how to contribute changes.

Deploying New Releases

Note

Only VBL members can make official releases.

There is a GitHub action configured to build and publish Ephys Link as a standalone EXE and as a PyPI package. The trigger is to make and push a new tag.

git switch main
git tag v2.0.0
git push origin --tags