Development environment

This page describes how to setup your development environment (Cloud or locally) to contribute to Powertools for AWS Lambda (TypeScript).

graph LR
    Dev["Development environment"] --> Quality["Run quality checks locally"] --> PR["Prepare pull request"] --> Collaborate

End-to-end process

Requirements

First time contributing to an open-source project ever?

Read this introduction on how to fork and clone a project on GitHub.

You'll need the following installed:

• GitHub account. You'll need to be able to fork, clone, and contribute via pull request.
• Node.js 24.x. The repository contains an .nvmrc file, so if you use tools like nvm, fnm you can switch version quickly.
• npm 10.x. We use it to install dependencies and manage the workspaces.
• Docker. We use it to run documentation, and non-JavaScript tooling.
• Fork the repository. You'll work against your fork of this repository.

Additional requirements if running end-to-end tests

• AWS Account bootstrapped with CDK
• AWS CLI installed and configured

Local environment

You can use npm run setup-local to install all dependencies locally and setup pre-commit hooks.

Curious about what setup-local does under the hood?

We use npm scripts to automate common tasks locally and in Continuous Integration environments.

Local documentation

You might find useful to run both the documentation website and the API reference locally while contributing:

Using Docker (recommended)

1. Build the Docker image (only needed the first time):

npm run docs:docker:build

1. Run the documentation website:

npm run docs:docker:run

Using Python directly

If you have Python installed, you can run the documentation website and API reference locally without Docker:

1. Create a virtual environment and install dependencies:

npm run docs:local:setup

1. Run the documentation website:

npm run docs:local:run