Development Installation

A development installation can be done with a symlink. First it is recommended to make a new $KLAYOUT_HOME to not pollute the standard KLayout installation

Development KLayout

KLayout can use a different directory than the standard $HOME/.klayout. It will read the environment variable KLAYOUT_HOME on startup. So, simply setting that variable to a new folder works to make a completely new environment for KLayout and can server as a macro development environment.

Linux

This of course can be automated with a script as follows for bash or the like (should work on MacOS and Linux).

#!/bin/bash

export KLAYOUT_HOME=$HOME/.klayout-dev

/usr/bin/klayout

If this is e.g. copied to /usr/local/bin/klayout-dev (should work under any Debian and derivates such as Ubuntu etc.) and the execute flag is set (chmod +x /usr/local/bin/klayout-dev), it can be called with klayout-dev from a terminal (probably most DEs will also pick this up).

MetaInfo Ports development

In the development environment the repository of MetaInfo Ports can by symlinked into $KLAYOUT_HOME/salt/metainfo-ports for example. With this, KLayout will pick it up on startup and still allows modifications with either the macro development or an external IDE.

The following will work under linux, but should also work in MacOS or PowerShell on Windows.

ln -s <path_to_metainfo-ports_repository>/klayout $HOME/.klayout-dev/salt/metainfo-ports

Build docs

Install mkdocs with

python -m pip install mkdocs mkdocs-material mkdocs-section-index mkdocs-video pymdown-extensions

To use it locally run make docs. To use the internal mkdocs serve make docs-serve