Developer Guide
===============

To test latest changes to the rapthor pipeline or develop on your own branch:

1. Clone the rapthor repository
2. Start an interactive compute node on AWS (using ``srun``)
3. Edit and source `rapthor_dev_aws.sh` in the `scripts/` directory. This will set up a virtual
   python environment that with rapthor installed in editable mode.
4. Run ``pytest`` to ensure your environment is setup correctly.

.. note::

    To avoid unexpected behaviour while testing code changes by running rapthor, always use a fresh
    output directory and remove all temporary files from previous runs. If rapthor is run using the
    same parset as previously it will try to resume from the previous state (see `resuming rapthor
    <https://rapthor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/running.html#resuming-an-interrupted-run>`_).

.. note::

    When starting an interactive node for testing, make sure you request enough resources (e.g.
    ``cpus-per-task``) to satisfy the cluster parameters in your parset (e.g. ``max_cores``).

Development Container
---------------------

For local development, you can use the VS Code dev container which provides a pre-configured
environment with all dependencies installed. This is the recommended approach for local development
and testing. See the README.md file in the .devcontainer directory for detailed setup instructions
and usage.