Environment Setup

Steamship plugins are written in Python. We’ve standardized on venv for dependency management, and every plugin starter template comes with a requirements.txt and requirements.dev.txt file describing its dependencies.

If you add new dependencies as you develop, it is important that you add them to requirements.txt. Otherwise they will not be available when you deploy your plugin to the cloud.

To set up your virtual environment for the first time, run this command from your plugin’s root directory:

python3 -m venv .venv

You can activate your virtual environment by running:

source .venv/bin/activate

Your first time, or any time you add a dependency, run:

python -m pip install -r requirements.dev.txt
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt