Getting started

Development dependencies

Working on cryptography requires the installation of a small number of development dependencies in addition to the dependencies for Installation. These are listed in dev-requirements.txt and they can be installed in a virtualenv using pip. Before you install them, follow the build instructions in Installation (be sure to stop before actually installing cryptography). Once you’ve done that, install the development dependencies, and then install cryptography in editable mode. For example:

$ # Create a virtualenv and activate it
$ # Set up your cryptography build environment
$ pip install --requirement dev-requirements.txt
$ pip install --editable .

Make sure that pip install --requirement ... has installed the Python package vectors/ and packages on tests/ . If it didn’t, you may install them manually by using pip on each directory.

You will also need to install enchant using your system’s package manager to check spelling in the documentation.

You are now ready to run the tests and build the documentation.

OpenSSL on macOS

You must have installed OpenSSL via Homebrew or MacPorts and must set CFLAGS and LDFLAGS environment variables before installing the dev-requirements.txt otherwise pip will fail with include errors.

For example, with Homebrew:

$ env LDFLAGS="-L$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)/lib" \
    CFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)/include" \
    pip install --requirement ./dev-requirements.txt

Alternatively for a static build you can specify CRYPTOGRAPHY_SUPPRESS_LINK_FLAGS=1 and ensure LDFLAGS points to the absolute path for the OpenSSL libraries before calling pip.

Tip

You will also need to set these values when Building documentation.

Running tests

cryptography unit tests are found in the tests/ directory and are designed to be run using pytest. pytest will discover the tests automatically, so all you have to do is:

$ pytest
...
62746 passed in 220.43 seconds

This runs the tests with the default Python interpreter.

You can also verify that the tests pass on other supported Python interpreters. For this we use tox, which will automatically create a virtualenv for each supported Python version and run the tests. For example:

$ tox
...
ERROR:   pypy: InterpreterNotFound: pypy
 py38: commands succeeded
 docs: commands succeeded
 pep8: commands succeeded

You may not have all the required Python versions installed, in which case you will see one or more InterpreterNotFound errors.

Building documentation

cryptography documentation is stored in the docs/ directory. It is written in reStructured Text and rendered using Sphinx.

Use tox to build the documentation. For example:

$ tox -e docs
...
docs: commands succeeded
congratulations :)

The HTML documentation index can now be found at docs/_build/html/index.html.