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Getting Started

Pre-Requisites

The DataVis support tooling is written in both JavaScript and Python: you will need to have them both installed. Using pyenv is required for managing Python versions, as we will create a virtualenv to install the packages that DataVis needs. You'll also need some other command line tools: GNU Make, and GNU Awk.

??? help "Installing Node with nvm"

See instructions [on the NVM GitHub repository](https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm#installing-and-updating).

??? help "Installing Python with pyenv"

1. [install pyenv](https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv#installation)
2. [install the virtualenv plugin](https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv-virtualenv#installation)
3. Use `pyenv` to install an appropriate version of Python.

!!! example "Full example on MacOS"

The following should get you everything you need on MacOS, ready for the "setup" step below.

```
$ brew install make gawk node pyenv pyenv-virtualenv
$ eval "$(pyenv init -)"
$ pyenv install 3.12.2
```

After getting all that installed, you can run the following to get all the required Node and Python packages. By default, a virtualenv will be created using the most recent version of Python installed via pyenv, but you can override that using the PYTHON_VER variable.

$ make [PYTHON_VER=...] setup

Compiling

After installing the Pre-Requisites, run make datavis to build the JS and CSS files for DataVis. You can also run make tests to (1) build and copy the JS and CSS files to tests/pages, and (2) generate the data files needed for testing. See Generating Data for more information about how test data is created.

Rapid Development

As of DataVis v3.3 you no longer need to compile every time you want to test changes. make serve now runs Vite, so as long as you’re using a test page written to take advantage of hot module reloading, the page will refresh automatically as soon as you edit a source file.

See Using Vite for an example Vite page.

Running the Local Server

By running the local HTTP server, you can easily get to the documentation and test pages as you work on the code. It can be started with make PORT=3000 serve. Here are some links for useful stuff, once you get it running:

!!! note "Specifying the Server’s Port" By default, the local HTTP server uses whatever port is available, and prints the address when it starts. For most use cases, this is enough; but if necessary, you can force the server to bind to a specific port using the PORT environment variable. Port 3000 is what’s used by the automated tests, so that’s what we use in this manual.