Installing iCalendar

To install the icalendar package, use:

pip install icalendar

If installation is successful, you will be able to import the iCalendar package, like this:

>>> import icalendar

Development Setup

To start contributing changes to icalendar, you can clone the project to your file system using Git. You can fork the project first and clone your fork, too.

git clone https://github.com/collective/icalendar.git
cd icalendar

Installing Python

You will need a version of Python installed to run the tests and execute the code. The latest version of Python 3 should work and will be enough to get you started. If you like to run the tests with different Python versions, the following setup process should work the same.

Install Tox

First, install tox..

pip install tox

From now on, tox will manage Python versions and test commands for you.

Running Tests

tox manages all test environments in all Python versions.

To run all tests in all environments, simply run tox

tox

You may not have all Python versions installed or you may want to run a specific one. Have a look at the documentation. This is how you can run tox with Python 3.9:

tox -e py39

Accessing a tox environment

If you like to enter a specific tox environment, you can do this:

source .tox/py39/bin/activate

Install icalendar Manually

The best way to test the package is to use tox as described above. If for some reason you cannot install tox, you can go ahead with the following section using your installed version of Python and pip.

If for example, you would like to use your local copy of icalendar in another Python environment, this section explains how to do it.

You can install the local copy of icalendar with pip like this:

cd icalendar
python -m pip install -e .

This installs the module and dependencies in your Python environment so that you can access local changes. If tox fails to install icalendar during its first run, you can activate the environment in the .tox folder and manually setup icalendar like this.

Try it out:

Python 3.9.5 (default, Nov 23 2021, 15:27:38)
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import icalendar
>>> icalendar.__version__
'5.0.8'

Building the documentation locally

To build the documentation follow these steps:

$ source .tox/py39/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements_docs.txt
$ cd docs
$ make html

You can now open the output from _build/html/index.html. To build the presentation-version use make presentation instead of make html. You can open the presentation at presentation/index.html.

You can also use tox to build the documentation:

cd icalendar
tox -e docs