Contribute to development

SQLMesh is licensed under Apache 2.0. We encourage community contribution and would love for you to get involved. The following document outlines the process to contribute to SQLMesh.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following installed on your machine. Exactly how to install these is dependent on your operating system.

• Docker
• Docker Compose V2
• OpenJDK >= 11
• Python >= 3.9 < 3.13

Virtual environment setup

We do recommend using a virtual environment to develop SQLMesh.

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Once you have activated your virtual environment, you can install the dependencies by running the following command.

make install-dev

Optionally, you can use pre-commit to automatically run linters/formatters:

make install-pre-commit

Python development

Run linters and formatters:

make style

Run faster tests for quicker local feedback:

make fast-test

Run more comprehensive tests that run on each commit:

make slow-test

Documentation

In order to run the documentation server, you will need to install the dependencies by running the following command.

make install-doc

Once you have installed the dependencies, you can run the documentation server by running the following command.

make docs-serve

Run docs tests:

make doc-test

UI development

In addition to the Python development, you can also develop the UI.

The UI is built using React and Typescript. To run the UI, you will need to install the dependencies by running the following command.

pnpm install

Run ide:

make ui-up

Developing the VSCode extension

Similar to UI development, you can also develop the VSCode extension. To do so, make sure you have the dependencies installed by running the following command inside the vscode/extension directory.

pnpm install

Once that is done, developing the VSCode extension is most easily done by launching the Run Extensions debug task from a Visual Studio Code workspace opened at the root of the SQLMesh repository. By default, the VSCode extension will run the SQLMesh server locally and open a new Visual Studio Code window that allows you to try out the SQLMesh IDE. It opens the examples/sushi project by default. To set up Visual Studio Code to run the Run Extensions debug task, you can run the following command which will copy the launch.json and tasks.json files to the .vscode directory.

make vscode_settings