Manim Installation For Developers

This documentation is for developers who want to contribute to ManimCommunity/manim.

Thank you for your interest in contributing! Please see our documentation on Contributing to take the necessary steps before installing Manim as a developer. This documentation assumes you have already taken the necessary steps to clone your fork.

Warning

If you have installed a non-developer version of manim, please uninstall it. This is to avoid any accidental usage of the non-developer version when developing and testing on your local copy of the repository. This warning doesn’t apply for users who use poetry (chapter below.)

For Developers with Poetry (Recommended)

Poetry can be easily installed in any OS by running the following command:

Linux / OSX / BashOnWindows install instructions

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py | python

Windows PowerShell install instructions

(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/get-poetry.py -UseBasicParsing).Content | python

Note

Poetry can be installed by other ways also, such as with pip. See https://python-poetry.org/docs/#alternative-installation-methods-not-recommended. If you are using MacOS with the Homebrew package manager, you can also install poetry with brew install poetry.

It will add it to PATH variable automatically. In order to make sure you have poetry installed correctly, try running:

poetry --version

Note

You may need to restart your shell in order for the changes to take effect.

See the docs on installation python poetry for more information.

Installing System Dependencies

Please follow the instructions under Installing Manim to install all dependencies (e.g. LaTeX, ffmpeg, etc.). Afterwards, proceed with the installation with Poetry.

Important

Windows Users can skip the steps to install Pycairo.

Installing Manim using Poetry

1. Use the following command to install python dependencies. This will use the system python:

   poetry install
   

   Note

   The first time running this command, poetry will create and enter a virtual environment rooted at the current directory.

   For more information you can visit the poetry documentation.

2. If you exit the virtual environment, you can reactivate the Poetry virtual environment with:

   poetry shell
   

   If you only need to run a single command, use:

   poetry run <your-command>
   

Now you are free to start developing!

Running the Tests Using Poetry

After completing Installing Manim using Poetry, you can run manim’s test suite by activating a shell using poetry shell command and then running the command pytest to run the tests.

poetry shell
pytest

Important

You should always run the test suite before making a PR. See contributing for details.

Code Formatting and Linting Using Poetry

Once you are done with Installing Manim using Poetry, you can run the code formatter black by activating entering the virtual environment:

poetry shell
black manim

Or alternatively, without entering the virtual environment:

poetry run black manim

For example, if you have written some new example and want to format it and see lint information use the commands below.

poetry run black example_scenes

Similarly, you can see linting information for a given file, or directory, by the black command with pylint.

For Developers with pip

python3 -m pip install .

Please see contributing for more details about contributing to Manim. Since pip doesn’t implement editable installations from our pyproject.toml