Development Setup

Canonical local setup for contributing to VT Code.

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (stable) via rustup
• Git
• One LLM provider API key for local interactive runs (OPENAI_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, GEMINI_API_KEY, GOOGLE_API_KEY, ZAI_API_KEY, MOONSHOT_API_KEY, STEPFUN_API_KEY, or MINIMAX_API_KEY)

One-Time Setup

git clone https://github.com/vinhnx/vtcode.git
cd vtcode
./scripts/setup.sh --with-hooks

./scripts/setup.sh verifies rustfmt/clippy, installs cargo-nextest when missing, and runs cargo check.

For debug or release launches:

./scripts/run.sh
./scripts/run-debug.sh

Daily Development Loop

# Fast compile check
cargo check

# Fast test loop (recommended)
cargo nextest run

# Fallback if nextest is unavailable
cargo test --workspace

Full Quality Gate

./scripts/check.sh

This runs formatting checks, linting, governance checks, build, tests (nextest-first), and docs generation.

Common Commands

# Format
cargo fmt --all

# Lint (deny warnings)
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings

# Build
cargo build --workspace

# Docs
cargo doc --workspace --no-deps --document-private-items

Troubleshooting

• cargo nextest missing:
  • Run cargo install cargo-nextest --locked
• API key missing for interactive runs:
  • Export one provider key, for example export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."
• Script permissions:
  • Run chmod +x scripts/*.sh