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System Tools

The system tools are expected to be installed and available globally on your system (i.e. in PATH).

  1. Operating System: Linux is preferred. Most projects also work with Windows. Most projects should also work with MacOS but they are not tested.

  2. GNU Utils: Coreutils like cp, rm, mkdir should be available although they are not required for every project. For Windows users please use Microsoft fork of uutils/coreutils

    Warning

    The Microsoft version of coreutils is still an early product and has some rough edges. It also requires some complicated powershell integration. If you have to work on Windows, it’s recommended to test if the project already works without Coreutils, or use Windows Subsystem for Linux directly.

    Some other utils like find, xargs, sed, wget, grep might be needed for some projects.

  3. Task Runner: Please install the latest version of task. This is a great cross-platform script runner

    Note

    This is a great cross-platform script runner with an implementation of coreutils built-in, which is the reason why Windows don’t usually need Coreutils unless for compatibility reason). It’s also a great way to make the build system consistent across languages - instead of scripts in package.json which would only work with the NPM ecosystem, every project has a Taskfile.yml which works regardless of the language/ecosystem.

  4. Git submodule manager: For projects with submodules it’s recommended to use magoo, which is a wrapper for git submodule. If you are a veteran of git-submodule commands you can also run

    Note

    If you are a veteran of git-submodule commands, you can also opt to run the git-submodule commands directly.

    Magoo offers an interface more like a modern package manager (such as npm or cargo); Most contributors just need to run magoo install when they git pull to checkout the submodules.

In addition to the general system tools, please setup the language-specific tool depending on the project you are working on. Some projects use multiple languages and you will need to have all of them installed.

Rust

For Rust projects:

  • Install Rust (recommended through rustup)
  • Windows users would need to install MSVC dependencies, please follow the guide on the Rustup download page.
  • Projects may require additional tools that are written in Rust. Run task install-cargo-extra-tools or task icets for short from the repo root.
  • rust-analyzer is the official language server. Install the rust-analyzer extension in VS Code, or if you use another editor, the corresponding extension/plugin for that editor for Rust Analyzer.

TypeScript/ECMAScript/JS

Tip

The steps below sets up PNPM and use it as the runtime/toolchain manager. If you already have another runtime/toolchain manager (such as nvm), you can install the runtimes use your preferred method. If it also supports the devEngines field, you will also get an error or warning if your currently installed engine version is not compatible.

For TypeScript/ECMAScript (aka JS) projects:

  • Install PNPM which acts as a unified toolchain, engine, and package manager.
  • Install NodeJS v26 with PNPM: pnpm i -g node@26.
  • Some projects may also need Bun. You can either install it standalone or through PNPM: pnpm i -g bun
  • Install TypeScript and ESLint extension for VS Code, or if you use another editor, the corresponding TypeScript extension/plugin for that editor.

C/C++

For C or C++ projects:

  • Install CMake
  • Install Ninja. This is especially needed for Windows to generate build commands for clangd
  • Install a C compiler. For Windows this usually means you need MSVC (from Visual Studio Build Tools). Sometimes you need the GNU toolchain for Windows instead, one option is LLVM-MINGW
  • Install clang-format and clang-tidy from the LLVM toolchain. For Windows you can download from the official LLVM release
  • Install the clangd extension for VS Code (NOT the official C/C++ extension). For other editor please install the corresponding clangd extension/plugin for that editor.

Java

For Java projects:

  • A decently modern JDK is expected to be installed on the system to run Gradle. You don’t need to install the exact version the project uses because Gradle will handle that. A JDK installed through a version manager like jabba will also work.
  • My version of gradlew which does not require jar files in the repo (Read more in the link for the security concerns of that).
  • I have a very custom LSP setup with JDTLS and Neovim but any editor that can work with a Gradle project should work.

Python

For Python projects or projects that contain python scripts:

  • Install uv