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Developer Contribution Guidance

Welcome, contributor. This series walks you through everything you need to contribute to Microbots — from preparing your machine to following the project's code and documentation standards.

Before you write any code, review the Contributing file for the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and the Code of Conduct. You only need to sign the CLA once across all Microsoft repositories.

What this series covers

This guidance is split into three articles. Read them in order the first time:

  1. Environment Setup (this article) — prepare prerequisites and clone the repository.
  2. Pre-commit Setup — install the local quality checks that run before every commit.
  3. Docstring & Writing Guidelines — write docstrings and documentation that meet the project's standards.

Step 1 — Install the Prerequisites

Microbots needs two tools on your machine before you can run or contribute to it:

  1. Python — the runtime that Microbots is written in.
  2. Docker — the sandboxed environment in which bots execute.

If you have not installed these yet, follow the dedicated Pre-requisites article. It provides per-operating-system instructions for installing the correct Python version and setting up Docker, then verifying both.

Return here once python3 --version and docker ps both succeed. The rest of this series assumes those tools are installed and working.

Step 2 — Clone the Repository

With the prerequisites in place, you will now obtain the source code. Each command below is in its own block so you can copy them individually.

Clone the repository to your machine.

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/microbots.git

Move into the project directory. All remaining commands are run from here.

cd microbots

Step 3 — Create an Isolated Environment

You will install Microbots into a project-specific virtual environment. This keeps its dependencies separate from your system Python, so nothing is added globally.

Create the virtual environment in a .venv folder.

python -m venv .venv

Activate the virtual environment.

source .venv/bin/activate

Once activated, your shell prompt shows (.venv), indicating that Python and pip now refer to the environment you just created.

Step 4 — Install Microbots with Contributor Tooling

Install the package in editable mode with the optional dev dependency group. Editable mode (-e) links the installed package to your working copy, so your code changes take effect without reinstalling. The dev extra adds contributor-only tooling (pre-commit and numpydoc).

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Why the dev extra? pre-commit is a developer tool, not a runtime dependency. Keeping it in the dev optional-dependency group means people who install Microbots to use it stay lean, while contributors receive everything they need with one command.

Next Step

Your environment is ready. Continue to Pre-commit Setup to install the local checks that keep your contributions consistent with the project's standards.