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Anki development

Packaged betas

For non-developers who want to try beta versions, the easiest way is to use a packaged version - please see:

https://betas.ankiweb.net/

Pre-built Python wheels

Pre-built Python packages are available on PyPI. They are useful if you wish to:

  • Run Anki from a local Python installation without building it yourself
  • Get code completion when developing add-ons
  • Make command line scripts that modify .anki2 files via Anki's Python libraries

You will need the 64 bit version of Python 3.9 or 3.10 installed. 3.9 is recommended, as Anki has only received minimal testing on 3.10 so far, and some dependencies have not been fully updated yet. On Windows, only 3.9 will work. You can install Python from python.org or from your distro.

For further instructions, please see https://betas.ankiweb.net/#via-pypipip. Note that in the provided commands, --pre tells pip to fetch alpha/beta versions. If you remove --pre, it will download the latest stable version instead.

Building from source

Platform-specific instructions:

Before contributing code, please see Contributing.

If you'd like to contribute translations, please see https://translating.ankiweb.net/.

Building redistributable wheels

The ./run method described in the platform-specific instructions is a shortcut for starting Anki directly from Bazel. This is useful for quickly running Anki after making source code changes, but requires Bazel to be available, and will not play nicely with the debugging facilities in IDEs. For daily Anki, or using third-party Python tools, you'll want to build Python wheels instead.

The Python wheels are standard Python packages that can be installed with pip. You'll typically want to install them into a a dedicated Python virtual environment (venv), so that the dependencies are kept isolated from those of other packages on your system. While you can 'pip install' them directly using the system Python, other packages on your system may depend on different versions of those dependencies, which can cause breakages.

Run the following command to create Python packages:

On Mac/Linux:

./scripts/build

On Windows:

.\scripts\build.bat

The generated wheel paths will be printed as the build completes. You can then install them by copying the paths into a pip install command. Follow the steps on the beta site, but replace the pip install --upgrade --pre aqt[qt6] line with something like:

pyenv/bin/pip install --upgrade bazel-dist/*.whl

(On Windows you'll need to list out the filenames manually instead of using a wildcard).

You'll also need to install PyQt:

$ pyenv/bin/pip install pyqt6 pyqt6-webengine

or

$ pyenv/bin/pip install pyqt5 pyqtwebengine

Freeing Space

The build process will download about a gigabyte of dependencies, and produce about 6 gigabytes of temporary files. Once you've created the wheels, you can remove the other files to free up space if you wish.

  • bazel clean --expunge will remove the generated files, freeing up most of the space. The files are usualy stored in a subdir of ~/.cache/bazel/
  • rm -rf ~/.cache/bazel* will remove the cached downloads as well, requiring them to be redownloaded if you want to build again.
  • rm -rf ~/.cache/{yarn,pip} will remove the shared pip and yarn caches that other apps may be using as well.

Building with Docker

Linux users can build using the instructions above, or they can optionally build via Docker.

On Linux, the generated Anki wheel will have a filename like:

anki-2.1.49-cp39-abi3-manylinux_2_31_aarch64.whl

The 2_31 part means that the wheel requires glibc 2.31 or later. If you have built the wheel on a machine with an older glibc version, you will get an error if you try to install the wheel:

ERROR: No matching distribution found for anki

To avoid the error, you can rename the .whl file to match your glibc version.

If you still get the error, another possibility is that you are trying to install with an old version of Python - 3.9 or later is required.

On ARM Linux, please see the instructions in the pre-built wheels section about a system PyQt, and the notes at the bottom of Linux.

Running tests

You can run all tests at once. From the top level project folder:

bazel test ...

If you're in a subfolder, ... will run the tests in that folder. To run all tests, use //... instead.

To run a single Rust unit test with output, eg 'unbury':

bazel run rslib:unit_tests -- --nocapture unbury

To run a single Python library test, eg test_bury:

PYTEST=test_bury bazel run //pylib:pytest

On Mac/Linux, after installing 'fswatch', you can run mypy on each file save automatically with:

./scripts/mypy-watch

Fixing formatting

For formatting issues with .ts, .svelte and .md files, change to the folder that's causing the problem, and then run

bazel run //ts:format

For other packages, change to the folder and run

bazel run format

For the latter cases, you can also invoke the formatter from another folder by using the full path:

bazel run //rslib:format
bazel run //rslib:sql_format
bazel run //proto:format
bazel run //pylib:format
bazel run //qt:format
bazel run //pylib/rsbridge:format

Development speedups

If you're frequently switching between Anki versions, you can create a user.bazelrc file in the top level folder with the following, which will cache build products:

build --disk_cache=~/.cache/bazel/disk

It will grow with each changed build, and needs to be manually removed when you wish to free up space.

IDEs

Please see this separate page for setting up an editor/IDE.

Audio

Audio playing requires mpv or mplayer to be in your system path.

Recording also requires lame to be in your system path.

Build errors and cleaning

If you get errors with @npm and node_modules in the message, try deleting the node_modules folder.

On Windows, you may run into 'could not write file' messages when TypeScript files are renamed, as the old build products are not being cleaned up correctly. You can either remove the problem folder (eg .bazel/out/x64_windows-fastbuild/bin/ts/projectname), or do a full clean.

To do a full clean, use a bazel clean --expunge, and then remove the node_modules folder.

Tracing build problems

You can run bazel with '-s' to print the commands that are being executed.

Environmental Variables

If ANKIDEV is set before starting Anki, some extra log messages will be printed on stdout, and automatic backups will be disabled - so please don't use this except on a test profile.

If TRACESQL is set, all SQL statements will be printed as they are executed.

If LOGTERM is set before starting Anki, warnings and error messages that are normally placed in the collection2.log file will also be printed on stdout.

If ANKI_PROFILE_CODE is set, Python profiling data will be written on exit.

Mixing development and study

You may wish to create a separate profile with File>Switch Profile for use during development. You can pass the arguments "-p [profile name]" when starting Anki to load a specific profile.

If you're using PyCharm:

  • right click on the "run" file in the root of the PyCharm Anki folder
  • click "Edit 'run'..." - in Script options and enter: "-p [dev profile name]" without the quotes
  • click "Ok"