letta-server/docs/contributing_code.md

title, excerpt, category

title	excerpt	category
Contributing to the codebase	How to modify code and create pull requests	6581eaa89a00e6001012822c

If you plan on making big changes to the codebase, the easiest way to make contributions is to install Letta directly from the source code (instead of via pypi, which you do with pip install ...).

Once you have a working copy of the source code, you should be able to modify the Letta codebase an immediately see any changes you make to the codebase change the way the letta command works! Then once you make a change you're happy with, you can open a pull request to get your changes merged into the official Letta package.

📘 Instructions on installing from a fork and opening pull requests

If you plan on contributing your changes, you should create a fork of the Letta repo and install the source code from your fork.

Please see our contributing guide for instructions on how to install from a fork and open a PR.

Installing Letta from source

Reminder: if you plan on opening a pull request to contribute your changes, follow our contributing guide's install instructions instead!

To install Letta from source, start by cloning the repo:

git clone git@github.com:cpacker/Letta.git

Installing dependencies with poetry (recommended)

First, install Poetry using the official instructions here.

Once Poetry is installed, navigate to the Letta directory and install the Letta project with Poetry:

cd Letta
poetry install --all-extras
poetry shell

Now when you want to use letta, make sure you first activate the poetry environment using poetry shell:

$ poetry shell
(pyletta-py3.10) $ letta run

Alternatively, you can use poetry run (which will activate the poetry environment for the letta run command only):

poetry run letta run

Installing dependencies with pip

First you should set up a dedicated virtual environment. This is optional, but is highly recommended:

cd Letta
python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate

Once you've activated your virtual environment and are in the Letta project directory, you can install the dependencies with pip:

pip install -e '.[dev,postgres,local]'

Now, you should be able to run letta from the command-line using the downloaded source code (if you used a virtual environment, you have to activate the virtual environment to access letta):

$ . venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ letta run

If you are having dependency issues using pip, we recommend you install the package using Poetry. Installing Letta from source using Poetry will ensure that you are using exact package versions that have been tested for the production build.