Building pyA2L (from source)#

pyA2L ships binary wheels for common platforms on PyPI as pya2ldb. If a wheel is not available for your platform, you can build from source.

Prerequisites#

  • Python 3.10+

  • A C/C++ toolchain (e.g., MSVC Build Tools on Windows, Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS, or GCC/Clang on Linux)

  • CMake 3.12+

  • pip >= 21.3

  • Git (for fetching submodules)

Note: The project uses pybind11 and CMake under the hood. ANTLR and Java are not required for normal builds.

Git submodules#

pyA2L uses two git submodules for its native C++ extensions:

  • pybind11 — Python/C++ binding layer (pybind11/)

  • spdlog — Fast C++ logging library (pya2l/extensions/spdlog/, from gabime/spdlog)

When cloning the repository you must initialise these submodules, otherwise the build will fail with missing headers:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/christoph2/pyA2L.git

If you already cloned without submodules, run:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Development install#

If you plan to work on the codebase, a development install keeps sources editable:

pip install -v -e .

This uses the build backend defined in pyproject.toml and will recompile extensions as needed.

Building distribution artifacts#

Build a source distribution and wheel into the dist/ directory:

python -m build

You can then upload with twine.

Building the documentation#

The user guides live in docs/ (mostly Markdown). The Sphinx entry point is docs/index.rst, which links to those pages for convenient browsing on GitHub.

To build the Sphinx site locally:

python -m pip install -r docs/requirements.txt sphinx
sphinx-build -b html docs docs/_build/html

Open docs/_build/html/index.html in your browser.